The stupid elite

It seems obvious to me that our ruling elite has been getting less and less elite, less and less intelligent, since around 1875, and I have previously produced a great pile of anecdotal data on this subject, for example the endless dumbing down of university entrance tests throughout the twentieth century, the hilarious conversations found in the Challenger inquiry archives, showing spectacular examples of pointy haired boss syndrome, the staff of the World Bank, Obama’s scriptwriters, and so on and so forth.

Purging engineers for real, suspected, or imagined heresy, seemed to me to purge the smartest engineers – seemed to me that whether or not smarts equate to heresy, smarts are suspected to equate with heresy regardless of whether the suspect is really a heretic or not, much as the Khmer Rouge wound up murdering everyone who wore glasses. They did not intend to murder everyone who wore glasses, or even intend to murder intellectuals. If you told one of them they were murdering all the intellectuals he would not have believed you. He would have said “We are intellectuals, would we murder ourselves?” (And immediately thereafter the secret police would have dragged him away to the torture chambers because of excessively complicated sentence construction, leading to suspicions of disloyalty and plots, much as the New York Times gets agitated because it is unable to parse sentences spoken by Sarah Palin.)

The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession such as Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive, etc. increases with IQ to about 133. It then falls about 1/3 by 140. By 150 IQ the probability has fallen by 97%!

Observing heresy persecutions in engineering, looks to me to a good approximation, they are getting rid of everyone above 145, that everyone above three standard deviations is excluded from engineering or science in high status firms, so I am unsurprised by Ferguson’s report that the same applies in academia, law, and so forth.

Looks like they are recruiting people two standard deviations above the norm, but purging anyone significantly smarter, whether out of deliberate hostility to dangerously smart people, or because smart people exclude women and blacks.

When a female engineer tries to talk to a smart engineer, she finds it hard to talk to him about engineering, so she concludes he raped her repeatedly and demands a million dollars in compensation. Thus the exclusion of smart people could be inadvertent, as the extermination of smart people was with Khmer Rouge. The purging of smart engineers appears to be inadvertent, a byproduct of including women. Likely the same thing is happening to judges, as I see happening to engineers. I see engineers, don’t see judges. Ferguson sees judges.

Ferguson’s data does not address whether problem is getting worse or better. My anecdotal information indicates that the problem is getting worse, and has been getting worse since around 1870 or so. You notice that smart members of the elite, like Rumsfeld, are much older than regular members, and that when they say something that shows that they are smart, all the chimps get rattled, start shrieking and flinging poop.

The elite:

OK, I hear you saying, “these are two dumb as toad dropping nigger scum who won the debate because black and female.”

But could not they find someone black and female who had an IQ above retarded?

OK then, lets look for a white male Jewish member of the elite chosen for his performance in a STEM field. Aaron Swartz. Official genius. a Fellow of Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption.

Aaron Swartz conspicuously lacked hacking and social skills.

If he had been marginally competent at computers, he could have downloaded millions of documents from JSTOR through the MIT network without bringing the MIT network to a screaming halt, without committing burglary and vandalism against the MIT network administrators, without creating side effects that every single user of the MIT network noticed and was enraged by.

If he had been marginally competent at social skills, he would have known that despite the fact that the police and prosecutors were treating him as just another dumb no account petty crook, who got videotaped by security cameras performing criminal acts and got bagged by security, he was not going to prison, not going to be convicted, that he was still a member of the elite that never goes to jail or gets convicted no matter how stupid the crimes they commit.

If he had any of the normal prosocial qualities like diligence and forethought, would have found a way to hack the MIT network that was not blindingly obvious to every single user of the network.

Aaron Swartz, Jewish Harvard fellow, official genius, is only marginally smarter than the two retarded black ghetto scum that won the debate.

Now you can find genuinely smart members of the elite, for example Larry Summers. But notice: They are getting mighty long in the tooth.; whereas when you find a conspicuously retarded member of the elite, like Aaron Schwartz, they are very young. This is an elite that is getting dumber. When the likes of Larry Summers retire, they will be replaced by the likes of Aaron Swartz.

This is an elite that has been getting steadily dumber since 1875 or so. And it has been getting dumber faster.

Larry Summers born 1954. Aaron Swartz, official genius, born 1987.

A lot of people looking at the war powers debate say, ahh, that was Jews making black people look stupid. Well Aaron Swartz did not make Jews look smart.

239 Responses to “The stupid elite”

Ferguson does not say which professions are chosen by really smart people, only that certain professions were not chosen. So where are they? Maybe they are all working on Wall Street making obscene amounts of money. Maybe some professions like physician, while traditionally prestigious, are not worthwhile career paths for the elite.

(I was surprised to discover that the ob/gyn who delivered my children made significantly less than me; software engineers go to college for four years, don’t graduate with crushing debt loads, and don’t have a starter job of 100 hour work weeks designed to test if you collapse under exhaustion.)

It’s possible that folks with 150 IQs are getting euchred by 130 IQs, but does that really seem likely? Why not: “Yeah I’m in a lot of trouble with HR for ‘mansplaining’ to Alice. All I did was raise my voice a little. Charles never seems to have this trouble even though he’s smarter than me and way way smarter than Alice. I don’t know how he does it.”

Maybe the explanation is as simple as this: Standardized test scores aren’t that meaningful anymore. They matter, but so do “extracurricular activities” (i.e., demonstrating Universalist piety). So the smart kid who wants to get into a good college doesn’t bother studying for the SATs; the 1400 he gets will be good enough, what he really needs is to spend time saving the gay whales or whatever.

“Yeah I’m in a lot of trouble with HR for ‘mansplaining’ to Alice. All I did was raise my voice a little. Charles never seems to have this trouble even though he’s smarter than me and way way smarter than Alice. I don’t know how he does it.”

My observation is that you don’t get in trouble for raising your voice to Alice. You get in trouble for telling her to do stuff that she does not understand. Then comes the sexual harassment charge. The stupider you are, the less likely you are to tell her to do stuff that she does not understand, so, the less likely to get accused of sexual harassment.

If “mansplaining” meant shouting, they would just say shouting. It is more evocative. What “mansplaining” means is trying to explain stuff to a woman that only a man is likely to understand.

It’s possible that folks with 150 IQs are getting euchred by 130 IQs, but does that really seem likely?

If you have a 150 IQ you can explain stuff to the 130 IQ, and he can follow your explanation. You get laid off because you cannot explain stuff to the affirmative action engineer.

‘ If you have a 150 IQ you can explain stuff to the 130 IQ, and he can follow your explanation. You get laid off because you cannot explain stuff to the affirmative action engineer. ‘

I have a high IQ (150) and a schizoid personality, and I have always found it difficult to communicate with others. If I am discussing something that interests me (usually something academic, esoteric, or technical), the average person will act as if I am crazy; people who are intelligent (IQ > 130) and well-read usually have something substantive to say, though. If I am talking about my personal thoughts or my emotions, I rarely get through to anyone; my feelings and motives just don’t translate very well, so people (especially women) tend to misread me. I can usually read other people and comprehend their ideas, though.

Unfortunately, I never really applied myself in school or at work. I am incredibly unmotivated, and I have almost no ambition; I just like to passively observe interesting phenomena. I hope that I can use my mind more productively in the future.

I tend to agree with the article’s theory, that we don’t put 160+ IQ individuals in leadership positions because we can’t understand anything they say. Like the scene in “Idiocracy” where 100-IQ Joe Bauer tries to explain to a 40-IQ audience that plants need water. He finally convinces them by saying “I talked to the plants and they told me they need water”.

Linus Torvalds is not handicapped by his 160 IQ because he doesn’t have to explain anything to anyone. His authority over the Linux kernel is absolute, and when he decides something must be done, he does it himself.

I’m a bit sympathetic to Aaron Schwartz but that was deservedly brutal. Ouch.

That said some other slightly country will have a field day with our best and brightest one day, China is making steps in that direction or one day one of the shut out smart guys losers will get frisky with the now cheap gene sequences and printers and taking his money from his $15k a year job and some side work and make himself something to pay the world back with.

China has been working on eugenic plans for decades. Uncontested their assent is inevitable. The left doesn’t care. Race is nothing to them but a stick to beat their opponents with and silence dissent. It wouldn’t surprise me if the left believes somehow that a Chinese dominated world would be better.

The point of the article is not that the really smart are failing/failed because of mansplaining charges-there was certainly no mansplaining involved in the Challenger fiasco, and anyway, by the time you get to the point where you can get hit with a sexual harassment charge, you’ve already jumped through all the hoops, and the article is specifically talking about the really smart not being equipped to jump through them.

A false rape charge or sexual harassment charge is also a fairly rare event in absolute terms.

The point of the article is that with the current education system, the really smart spend their formative years in what amounts to a prison/monkey cage, being tortured by those much stupider than them. By the time they get into a position to master their fate, they are broken emotionally.

BTW, in a functional society, the really intelligent are trained to deal with the rest of humanity from a young age and find it as interesting as, say, physics. It’s much more difficult to get into this at an older age, though possible (Feynman.) For someone subjected to mass education, generally dealing with typical humans is difficult for the same reason that it would be difficult for someone who grew up being bitten in the face by dogs to then become a dog trainer. You’d really have to set your mind on it.

Schwartz got in trouble for being a stupid silly. A clever silly would have downloaded the database without being caught, without committing trespass, and without physically hacking the network with a screwdriver. Schwartz was treated like an ordinary criminal because he looked to cops like an ordinary criminal – gets videotaped by security cameras committing trespass and damaging other people’s property, bagged by security, then handed over to police wrapped up in a pink ribbon by the security guy.

The defining characteristic of a clever silly is that he has a complicated and extremely clever rationalization for doing something really stupid, which clever rationalization a normal person would not be deceived by, both because a normal person has common sense, and because the rationalization is far too complicated for a normal person to follow.

Aaron Swartz did a bunch of stupid things one after the other, with no clever rationalizations as to why they were not stupid.

by the time you get to the point where you can get hit with a sexual harassment charge, you’ve already jumped through all the hoops

You seldom get hit by a sexual harassment charge, in large part because you lose your job before it gets to that point. If the company fires someone for sexual harassment, then it admits that sexual harassment took place, and immediately every female on the planet wants a million dollars each from the company.

Informal and unofficial false rape charges seem extremely common. The woman does not want to go all the way through, because her charges are absurd, and would be exposed, and no one else wants her to go all the way through, so the accusations are kind of darkly hinted at, and then evaporate.

I do not think that informal and unofficial rape charges, or sexual harassment allegations in any stage are common at all. We can ask Wasenlightened, who works at Google, or Henry Dampier, who I think also works/ed in some such org, or Handle, who works in the Kontora. Guys, how common is this shit?

My personal impression is that we all know someone to whom it happened, but it’s entirely probable that it will never happen to us. Similar to the frequency of tragic and severe road accidents, or crippling injuries on parachute jumps in the military.

People tend to adapt to risky situations in such a way so that the frequency of fatal accidents remains close to constant. In other words, they are more careful when the risk is higher, and less careful when the risk is lower.

So, to evaluate risk, one should look not at the frequency of accidents, but at how careful people are in avoiding them.

I disagree with that measure of risk. People live with a high level of risk all the time and do fine. On the other hand, other people let the possibility of disastrous low-risk events drive them crazy with anxiety.

I read that post this morning. Nothing new there. Kill the chicken to scare the monkey.

Point is, this kind of thing is rare enough that it will never happen to the vast, vast majority of employees, but frequent/publicized enough that they all worry about it. Which is a horrible thing and a great injustice, but far from what Jim is describing, i.e., tons of female idiot employees getting people fired left and right for asking them to do something more complex than make coffee.

It is, of course, possible that in the near future, Google, MSFT, AMZN, APPL etc. will take a nosedive off the cliff, and Laszlo the HR guy from Google and that awful homosexual they have running Apple now will ride their Segways down the halls, impaling their victims with javelins on a daily basis. It’s also possible that they will keep their current level of coercion, which is comparable to the USSR post-Stalin or China post-Mao, indefinitely.

far from what Jim is describing, i.e., tons of female idiot employees getting people fired left and right for asking them to do something more complex than make coffee.

For every case where people say “sexual harassment, therefore fired” out loud there are a thousand cases where the employer does whatever he has to do to avoid anyone saying “sexual harassment” formally, officially, and out loud.

If you ever fire a male overtly and explicitly for sexual harassment, it is because you have already agreed to an out court settlement for a great big pile of money to the offended woman.

But not only do individuals attempt to avoid the risk of being a “rapist” or an “harasser”, employers also attempt to avoid the risk that they will be accused of tolerating rape or sexual harassment. And if anyone who shows signs of high IQ culture is at risk of being deemed a rapist, best per-emptively get rid of him.

As usual, when available evidence doesn’t support your contention, you make up an unfalsifiable theory. Yes, sure, there is a massive purge of preemptive firings to avoid sexual harassment lawsuits and false rape allegations driven by female employees’ inability to understand the male ones’ requests. It’s undetectable through normal means, but like the Phlogiston we must assume it’s there, else our theories make no sense.

There is a very real phenomenon, that smart people are increasingly excluded.

Seems to me the typical IQ around engineering departments is 130 or so. In which case, people with IQ 145 or so should be able to communicate with their fellow engineers well enough.

To explain the purge on the basis of communication gaps between people of very different intelligence, which is the most plausible theory explaining the exclusion of the smart, need to conclude that there is special sensitivity about failure to communicate with people of closer to normal IQ, which is to say, special sensitivity about failure to communicate with affirmative action engineers.

And, pretty obviously, there is.

If an engineer is not getting along with affirmative action engineers, they are going to get rid of him before there are any overt, official, charges, because they do not want there to be any overt, official charges.

That they are going to get rid of him for that reason is not observable. That they have reason to get rid of him, and he is in fact being gotten rid of, is observable.

I agree that, aside from being immoral and wicked, the system is inefficient and unsustainable. Which is enough to condemn it without making things up. If my neighbor beats his wife and leaves trash strewn around the lawn, it is unnecessary to accuse him of also being a child molesting satanist.

You claim to be a really smart person but repeatedly quote articles that you apparently don’t understand.

The point the article made was that really smart people were not graduating college, not getting those jobs in the first place, because of maladjustment.

You misinterpret that to say that affirmative action hires are getting those smarter than them fired.

If this were true, we would not see a spike in success with IQ centered on 130. The vast majority of AA hires are dumber than the average Cambridge faculty member. The article you linked quotes the average Cambridge faculty member as having an IQ of 126. I’m sure with your massive intellect you can make the inference but for those not similarly blessed I will spell it out: were your theory true, were the dumb AA hires massively getting their intellectual superiors fired, their intellectual superiors with IQs of 130 or so would not be so successful.

You claim to be a really smart person but repeatedly quote articles that you apparently don’t understand.

The point the article made was that really smart people were not graduating college, not getting those jobs in the first place, because of maladjustment.

You are a moronic twit: The part of the article I quote begins

“The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession …”

Get that: “Remaining in”

I will type that v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y for the slow witted “r-e-m-a-i-n-i-n-g i-n”

r–e–m–a–i–n–i–n–g i–n

In other words, smart people are getting thrown out mid career as well as failing to be admitted to college.

And I see them getting thrown out mid career.

The article does not say that they are maladjusted, and the people I see getting thrown out mid career do not look maladjusted to me.

Further, it seems to me that smart engineers do OK provided they stay away from affirmative action engineers and from companies that hire affirmative action engineers – and also stay away from companies that hire very large numbers of Indian engineers. Chinese engineers are fine, as are Indian engineers in smaller quantities.

Your theory, that smart people are commonly broken, fails to explain this.

I’ve given you my explanation. The system breaks the smart from childhood so that by the time they are adults, they are not capable of functioning well in organizations. It does this through sustained boredom and learned helplessness as well as torture at the hands of the stupid children.

In a linear model, ability to achieve tasks rises with IQ. If someone with an IQ of 130 solves the task of communication with those of average IQ well, someone with an IQ of 150 should solve it much better. That they don’t, that they utterly fail at this trivial task, is inexplicable with a linear model.

But in my model, there are other factors involved. The same factors that make it more difficult for the typical extremely smart person to communicate with the average make it more difficult for him to, eg, successfully commit data theft or to adequately react to the ensuing criminal persecution or to form successful sexual relationships.

In practical terms, brains only matter to the extent you can leverage them. A smart brain is easier to leverage than a genius one for simian problems (pack hierarchy, sex, property,) especially if the genius has spent his formative years being randomly tortured for displaying signs of “useless” intelligence. Thus, your spike at 130.

In a linear model, ability to achieve tasks rises with IQ. If someone with an IQ of 130 solves the task of communication with those of average IQ well, someone with an IQ of 150 should solve it much better. That they don’t, that they utterly fail at this trivial task, is inexplicable with a linear model.

We use our own minds to model other people’s minds. Obviously someone with IQ 145 is going to do a bad job at modeling someone of IQ 110, therefore, entirely unsurprising that he has trouble communicating with someone IQ 110.

Thus, for example, Epyx used ordinary people as games testers. Engineers had trouble communicating directly with games testers, who often had to communicate intangible faults like “This game sucks” and were not good at doing so. There was, however, a lead tester, who could communicate with engineers just fine, and communicate with regular testers just fine.

The fact that the engineers, who were all very smart, had difficulty communicating directly with the testers, is not an indication that we were broken, because we could communicate with each other quite well.

Well, being a moronic twit, I don’t have to worry about the stupids ganging up on me.

Anyway, an intelligent person, seeing an article saying that really intelligent people have a hard time getting into and staying in intellectually elite professions, would seek a parsimonious explanation for both of these.

But a HIGHLY INTELLIGENT person such as yourself would have to spin an intricate and counterintuitive explanation for the second part, failure to stay in intellectually elite professions, which says nothing for the first part, failure to get in. After all, the more complex and counterintuitive an explanation, the more HIGHLY INTELLIGENT its professor.

Yes, we use our minds to model others’ minds. No, it’s not reasonable that it would be harder for someone with an IQ of 145 to model the mind of someone with an IQ of 100 than for someone with an IQ of 120. Would an Aborigine with an IQ of 60 be a better dog trainer than someone with an IQ of 120? Would he be better at teaching small children?

What IS harder for really smart people is to manifest the sort of sustained interest in the chimp games of normal/bright people that leads one to become good at working with/leading/manipulating them. At least in the current Fabian educational system.

… and the 2SD theory does predict that in an organization where communication with 100 is a job requirement, the spike would be somewhere around, but below, 130. A real world number of 126 is a good, even spectacular, fit.

“His experiences as a child prodigy had proven so painful that he decided for the rest of his life to shun public exposure at all costs. Henceforth, he denied his gifts, refused to think about mathematics, and above all refused to perform as he had been made to do as a child…He found the concept of beauty, for example, to be completely incomprehensible, and the idea of sex repelled him. At fifteen he took a vow of celibacy, which he apparently kept for the remainder of his life, dying a virgin at the age of 46. He wore a vest summer and winter, and never learned to bathe regularly. A comment that Aldous Huxley once made about Sir Isaac Newton might equally have been said of Sidis.

For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.”

“One of the problems faced by all gifted persons is learning to focus their efforts for prolonged periods of time. Since so much comes easily to them, they may never acquire the self-discipline necessary to use their gifts to the fullest. Hollingworth describes how the habit begins.

Where the gifted child drifts in the school unrecognized, working chronically below his capacity (even though young for his grade), he receives daily practice in habits of idleness and daydreaming. His abilities never receive the stimulus of genuine challenge, and the situation tends to form in him the expectation of an effortless existence [3, p. 258].

But if the “average” gifted child tends to acquire bad adjustment habits in the ordinary schoolroom, the exceptionally gifted have even more problems. Hollingworth continues:

Children with IQs up to 150 get along in the ordinary course of school life quite well, achieving excellent marks without serious effort. But children above this mental status become almost intolerably bored with school work if kept in lockstep with unselected pupils of their own age. Children who rise above 170 IQ are liable to regard school with indifference or with positive dislike, for they find nothing in the work to absorb their interest. This condition of affairs, coupled with the supervision of unseeing and unsympathetic teachers, has sometimes led even to truancy on the part of gifted children”

“Hollingworth points out that the exceptionally gifted do not deliberately choose isolation, but are forced into it against their wills.

These superior children are not unfriendly or ungregarious by nature. Typically they strive to play with others but their efforts are defeated by the difficulties of the case… Other children do not share their interests, their vocabulary, or their desire to organize activities. They try to reform their contemporaries but finally give up the struggle and play alone, since older children regard them as “babies,” and adults seldom play during hours when children are awake. As a result, forms of solitary play develop, and these, becoming fixed as habits, may explain the fact that many highly intellectual adults are shy, ungregarious, and unmindful of human relationships, or even misanthropic and uncomfortable in ordinary social intercourse [3, p. 262].

But if the exceptionally gifted is isolated from his contemporaries, the gulf between him and the adult authorities in his life is even deeper.

The very gifted child or adolescent, perceiving the illogical conduct of those in charge of his affairs, may turn rebellious against all authority and fall into a condition of negative suggestibility–a most unfortunate trend of personality, since the person is then unable to take a cooperative attitude toward authority. A person who is highly suggestible in a negative direction is as much in bondage to others around him as is the person who is positively suggestible. The social value of the person is seriously impaired in either case. The gifted are not likely to fall victims to positive suggestion but many of them develop negativism to a conspicuous degree”

As I said, the trauma of being raised by chimps breaks them.

And only then does the article speak of a difficulty in communication, to segue back into this:

“There appear to be three sorts of childhoods and three sorts of adult social adaptations made by the gifted. The first of these may be called the committed strategy. These individuals were born into upper middle class families, with gifted and well educated parents, and often with gifted siblings. They sometimes even had famous relatives. They attended prestigious colleges, became doctors, lawyers, professors, or joined some other prestigious occupation, and have friends with similar histories. They are the optimally adjusted. They are also the ones most likely to disbelieve that the exceptionally gifted can have serious adjustment problems.”

In other words, these are the genii who grew up surrounded by the intelligent and were not broken, so they don’t have problems as adults.

“And so we see that the explanation for the Sidis tragedy is simple. Sidis was a feral child; a true man born into a world filled with animals–a world filled with us.”

I can tell you a thing or two about this from personal experience, if you’d like. Not that I’m of Sidis’ caliber.

I also suspect something strange starts happening on the right edge, where tests don’t give accurate results. The article mentions this briefly. It is probably how Feynman got his IQ score, an s.d. above average, if I recall.

I can’t stop myself from noticing that you’ve been playing Jim in this subthread, arriving at mostly correct conclusions based on scant anecdotal and personal evidence and wild speculation. 🙂

But the article does not support your theory that 150 is better at communicating with 100 than 130 is. And the data in it doesn’t predict a spike at 126. Table CMT-T [7, p. 50] says that there is virtually no maladjustment penalty at CMT-T score of 136.4, which corresponds to a Stanford-Binet IQ score of 150-159. Hollingworth posits that the optimal IQ is 125-155, which is in accordance with the above.

>I can’t stop myself from noticing that you’ve been playing Jim in this subthread, arriving at mostly correct conclusions based on scant anecdotal and personal evidence and wild speculation. 🙂

I didn’t really bring sources, but if I needed to, would have quoted John Taylor Gatto’s Underground History of American education, available for free online.

>But the article does not support your theory that 150 is better at communicating with 100 than 130 is.

That’s not really my theory. My theory is that if the current social and educational system wasn’t built around torturing the highly intelligent through their formative years, they would be better than the merely bright at communicating with the rest and leading them, the way they are better at neutral tasks. For instance, Newton did just fine running the Royal Mint, pretending to be a drunkard and infiltrating organized crime hangouts, etc. Goethe was a statesman, as was Metternich. Von Humboldt organized and led expeditions and was a socialite. Our own Sages provide examples of men who were, on one hand, genius scholars, on the other had extremely interesting lives requiring great social skills. For instance, Reish Lakish had been a bandit and gladiator in his youth, and Rabbi Elazar was a thieftaker.

>Hollingworth posits that the optimal IQ is 125-155, which is in accordance with the above.

Perhaps. On the other hand, perhaps with the right education, there is no top threshold.

The issue is that with increasing intelligence, people tend to move beyond immediate interests, first showing lower time preference, then moving past personal interest and progressively dwelling in more and more abstract realms.

“My theory is that if the current social and educational system wasn’t built around torturing the highly intelligent through their formative years, they would be better than the merely bright at communicating with the rest and leading them, the way they are better at neutral tasks.”

Indisputable, but “highly intelligent” in this sentence is 160.

The distribution Ferguson cites – 1.0 at 133, 0.7 at 140, 0.03 at 150 – implies that the penalty sets in at somewhere around 135.

No way are 135s socially maladjusted or tortured by the education system. Most of them even go to private schools with other 135s. There is a discrepancy of 20 points here. Something else penalizes above 135, and it’s not the education system.

Western society has been steadily getting more vicious, materialistic and intolerant of intellectual differences or mental independence. I suspect that this explains the effect, because the amount of suffering inflicted upon smart children by their intelligent peers and teachers has increased correspondingly. Also add mass psychiatric medication of misfits.

Circumstantial evidence for this conjecture includes school shootings, which were unheard of 60 years ago, despite much laxer gun controls.

Up to about IQ 130, a child’s got a decent chance of being placed in an advanced group with his equals. But past that, every point increases isolation. And being able to live in abstract and wonderful worlds is dangerous-while your peers are working out status hierarchies, you are dreaming about space or strange animals or what have you.

I do not think that informal and unofficial rape charges, or sexual harassment allegations in any stage are common at all.

It is almost an instinctive reaction with women. Any time she feels you are talking down to her, any time she fails to get her way with anyone, she summons white knights to her aid. And the act of summoning white knights necessarily involves kind of sort of alleging that she was kind of sort of raped harassed.

But yes, wasenlightened will likely tell you women never do that, well hardly ever, and when they do, it is because they are cruelly victimized.

In all my accounts of Kelly Ellis’ “harassment” I used scare quotes around the word, and I explained my opinion that her “harasser” did nothing wrong. In fact I am so sure that he is being wrongly smeared that I refuse to use his name.

How you got from that to “wasenlightened will likely tell you women never do that, well hardly ever, and when they do, it is because they are cruelly victimized”, I have no idea.

“””
It is almost an instinctive reaction with women. Any time she feels you are talking down to her, any time she fails to get her way with anyone, she summons white knights to her aid. And the act of summoning white knights necessarily involves kind of sort of alleging that she was kind of sort of raped harassed.
“””

If this were true it would be impossible for any company, school, government institution in America to function. We would have trouble keeping ourselves fed, watered, powered.

I recently took a trip out of town and rented a car. The clerk at the rental shop was a black woman. It took awhile to get the vehicle and it was clear from my questions and my body language that I was impatient. She did not complain to her supervisor that I was a racist, nor did she make rape claims. She smiled and apologized and gave me a discount.

As with crime committed by minorities, there is too much “sexual harassment”, the effects are destructive, the threat makes everyone wary and less productive. But like crime, it does not happen “any time”.

The customer facing part of corporate America is prepared to take a whole lot of shit with a smile. It is their job to sooth asshole customers and send them on their way feeling happy. Corporate America is entirely open that it has no intention of stopping customers from engaging in microaggressions. Which is why it is relatively safe to hit on shopgirls.

Nonetheless, high status corporate America, the part of corporate America that has to grow a million tentacles in order to send someone to each of a million meetings with each of the government’s million tentacles, is serious about stopping microaggressions in the workplace. So if a woman feels microagressed against, she feels entitled to do something, indeed obligated to do something, even if she is not terribly clear in her own mind just what the wrongful behavior of the microaggressor was.

No enemies to the right works fine. Its purpose is not to avoid being attacked from the right. Its purpose is to avoid being attacked from the left with the charge that you’re too right, forcing you in turn to attack from the left in order to prove your not-too-right-ness.

Not sure if it’s really possible to attack a monarch from the right, as not attacking the monarch is a fundamental part of the rightness, but even if it were, Nazis have never been to the right of royalists.

The main thing preventing a switch to (real, not symbolic) monarchy is US influence. You don’t even really need a “plan” – even if you don’t already have a monarch in reserve, which my country actually happens to, you just grab some random European aristocrat and make him king. This has actually worked in the past.

My point is not so much that installing a monarch is easy, but that the important, primary, determining factor is US influence, not my not having a monarch or a plan of installing one.

Well, we don’t have the option of easy. It’s not possible for a dynasty to spring fully formed from the void.

But that’s mostly theoretical at this point. The US killed the European monarchies, and it will not allow any restorations.

So the necessary condition for a restoration in Europe is for the State Department to decide to no longer kill monarchies in Europe. For which it needs to be staffed with people who don’t view monarchies as evil. For which monarchies need to acquire an image of not evil among the cool people who will grow up to staff the State Department.

“We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose because we know that in such a government, following such methods, we can never have a friend; and that in the presence of its organized power, always lying in wait to accomplish we know not what purpose, there can be no assured security for the democratic governments of the world.”

“We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretence about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”

The world has indeed been made safe for democracy, and has been kept that way ever since.

Carlyle pointed out that long before 1848 the Monarchs had largely stopped thinking of themselves as rightful rulers of their domain, a sentiment shared by their subjects. Figureheads, living symbols with minor political functions, but not rulers.

To try to go back 300 years in a leap would be quite difficult. See how poorly it went for Athens post-democracy. It’s the national equivalent of a prostitute deciding to become a chaste matriarch.

They don’t think that by removing a statue they can change the past and the future, they live in the present. Black rule with white technology is unstable, but they’ll milk it as long as they are permitted to

Social life in progressive society involves a great deal of subtle signalling and positioning. Truth and reality are both objective and social. Smart people are naturally drawn to objective truth, and lack the social antenna to get along with others.

LOTB is obsessed with how intelligent politicians are, the usual subjects being described as morons of course. But people can only deal effectively with others in a certain range of intelligence from them. I think the ideal IQ for a politician or businessman is about 130. He can understand all people OK, and deals well with the 115 to 120 IQ people who work for him. He can understand and deal with the eggheads of 140 IQ or more he needs to deal with sometimes, although of course he finds them a little weird and annoying.

People above 140 are regarded as weird and annoying by people of 130, and complete freaks by those less intelligent. People below 120 aren’t going to have enough brainpower to handle top-level management tasks.

The one exception I can think of is Bill Clinton, who seems to be very very smart (150? 160?) but has super social skills as well. Jimmy Carter was very smart but flamed out. I guess maybe Wall Street has very smart people with good social skills, but that world is pretty secret so it’s hard to say.

They’ve only really been getting dumber since 1965, which is when the ah…”Elites” you mention above roar into power.

One would think Rule of The Smart taking us into a Dark Age that has already begun all around us would discredit the argument that the smart should rule…but if that’s your game…

Larry Summers is by the way criminally insane [Rape of Russia/QE Infinity] so his intelligence is irrelevant.

By the way Intelligence=Elites is only 1940 forward phenomenon. In particular Intelligence being such a Virtue as to excuse the absence of real virtue by being exempted from conscription from WW2 through 1973. In short Intelligence as a confidence game for shirking and cowardice.

Soon enough I warrant the Cambodians won’t be the only ones who hunted down and exterminated their intellectuals.

Intelligence isn’t a virtue, it’s a trait or a gift like any trait or skill. As to the Intellectuals they’re so harmful that hopefully when this is all over they’ll be held in the same regard as pagan priests practicing Human Sacrifice, that is to say as the freakish monsters they are….and in a practical sense not very smart.

The aristoi don’t need it: they have since the days of Ajax and Odysseus

Intelligent people are good at lying: this is why the king needs loyal intelligent courtiers. If only it was possible to test loyalty as easily as intelligence – if it had been in the ‘20s, we wouldn’t be in this situation

The Hep B vaccine given at birth, 1 month, and 6 months contains 250 mcg and the Vax series 4000 mcg over the first six months. If we assume 2 micrograms of aluminum does the same damage injected in a 4 kg neonate as 1 mcg in a 2kg one, and model 1 development point as 1 IQ point, vaccine aluminum is projected to cause a loss of 15 IQ points.

If you look at the FDA webpage entitled Study Reports Aluminum in Vaccines Poses Extremely Low Risk to Infants http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/ScienceResearch/ucm284520.htm the study they are referring to is Mitkus et al.
Mitkus et al is a mathematical model, they made NO observations or measurements at all. And the model is based on experiments feeding aluminum to weaned animals. It is not informed about the toxicity of injected aluminum in neo-nates in any way. Why would they prefer that to the direct measurement of the toxicity found in Bishop et al?

If we assume 2 micrograms of aluminum does the same damage injected in a 4 kg neonate as 1 mcg in a 2kg one, and model 1 development point as 1 IQ point, vaccine aluminum is projected to cause a loss of 15 IQ points.

Oral alumina is likely to be relatively harmless, because it is the most common and ancient environmental toxin of them all, therefore we surely have mechanisms for dealing with it – probably refusing to absorb it from the intestine, and/or filtering it out as it passes through the liver and passing it back into the intestine through bile duct to be eventually excreted.

However, by the same argument intravenous injection is likely to be immensely more damaging than skin or intramuscular injection. In order to harm the brain, has to reach the brain, and there are likely to be mechanisms to immobilize common poisons, alumina being the commonest of them all, at the site of the wound.

Which does not imply it is a good idea to inject your child with enough alumina to make him stupid, even if it is probable we have unknown and unmeasured defense systems against it.

Your guesses are quite near the truth. 99.75% of dietary aluminum is not uptaken to the circulation, but shunted straight into the poop. This is why, although infants ingest slightly more aluminum in the breast milk of the first six months than they get shot with in the vaccines, nonetheless the vaccines contribute hundreds of times as much to the circulatory flow.

Aluminum injected is said to be trapped near the muscle for a prolonged period, but all authorities seem to agree virtually 100% of the injected aluminum evenutally makes its way into circulation over a period of weeks.

Another protective filter is the kidneys, which quickly filter any dietary aluminum that makes its way into the blood by accident into the urine, which will normally be in the form Aluminum Citrate. Unfortunately, according to some papers, the aluminum in the vaccines is bound up with antigen and OH, rendering it too large a molecule for the kidneys to evade. In fact, ability to evade expulsion by the kidneys is apparently a design feature in crafting the vaccine.

>.Try explaining something complex to a dullard in a way that doesn’t elicit a “That’s boring!” or a “Quit talkin’ down to me!” and then tell us how things went.<<

The topic at hand is elite managers not being able to comprehend their elite workers. It's in their interest to understand them, and it's in the interest of the workers to be understood. The 'it's boring' or 'quit talkin' down to me' reactions can hardly be expected..

I'd say there is a real problem, and that problem is smart people being too fucking sure of themselves, having too big egos and consequently being unable to cooperate well. No doubt envy too, star performers attract that too. But I'm skeptical about the incomprehensibility angle.

Someone with a 160 IQ and someone with a 130 IQ who try to interact also face the same kinds of social challenges that a 130 IQ person and a 90 IQ person do when they try to interact. It’s just that the stumbling blocks are, oh, string theory or what have you on the one hand, and maybe trigonometry or something like that on the other.

no, the problem is the semi-smart people can be told complicated things, and then truly believe those things, and then try to outvote the smart people. and the other problem is that the difference between semi-smart and smart isn’t really all that clear.

Trig is being dumbed down. If you asked a Harvard graduate to prove from first principles a fast method for calculating an arbitrarily good approximation to the value of pi, then in the unlikely event that he understood the question, would probably not be able to answer it.

Hence Feynman was alienated his whole life from his students with IQs of 130. He just couldn’t figure out how to communicate in a way they would find interesting! That’s why on video, he is completely devoid of charisma and his autobiography is so incomprehensible and unfunny.

Feynman remarked of the time he was working on the atom bomb how much easier it was to talk to people. He would just say something, and people would understand it and remember it, and it would not need to be said many times in several different ways. Feynman was working on the atom bomb with a bunch of other great scientists.

So yes, Feynman learned to talk to normals pretty well, perhaps starting with his education in picking up women. But he had to learn it and work on it.

Of course it is easier to communicate with people who are closer to you in intelligence, interests and background. Communicating with people who are further from you is a task. Intelligence is, roughly, the ability to figure out how to accomplish tasks. Ergo…

As I pointed out earlier, dumb people don’t make better dog trainers or primary school teachers, although the mental difference between them and their wards is smaller.

Most girls are pretty stupid, but men, being highly motivated, learn to talk to them, about silly simple stuff, and give up trying to make sense and be logical, and lots of very smart men eventually get pretty good at it. If you look at the PUA advice for talking to girls, it is fortune telling, cold readings, and telling silly stories. The advice implies that girls are vain self absorbed empty headed morons that cannot follow a coherent thought for thirty seconds, probably reflecting the fact that PUA community is well above average intelligence, and is hitting on girls of average intelligence.

But let us suppose you are a really smart engineer in Google, and a poster girl has been put in charge of creating Google+, and you are trying to explain to her why her plans for Google+ are really stupid … telling her fortune and giving her a cold reading is not an option.

The smarter you are, the more you are going to be deemed to mansplaining when you talk to your poster girl boss of Google+, and they more you are deemed to be mansplaining, they more you are going be deemed to be sexually harassing, and the more you are deemed to be sexually harassing, the more you will be deemed to be raping.

I can’t really argue about an unfalsifiable and undetectable phenomenon in any productive fashion. Perhaps witches are poisoning people in our midst constantly, causing them to die in ways indistinguishable from natural causes and random accidents. Perhaps.

2) Kelly Ellis was never in charge of Google Plus. She was, according to her LinkedIn, working on a team that was in charge of some front end features of Google Plus. One lie, all lies, man! Er…

Anyway, the team, again, according to her LinkedIn, consisted of three females and one male.

After that, she went and worked on a team that built something for distributing social graph data. This team consisted of her and six males.

If your assessment was correct, the prime targets for her sexual harassment complaints would have been her male team members. Actually, Google would have pre-emptively fired them before she’d had the opportunity to make those complaints.

From LinkedIn, we can see that all seven of the male team members Ellis worked with at Google are still working there. Which falsifies your theory. I fully expect you will slap another elaborate theory on there to explain how this data is in fact consistent with your original theory.

3) Again according to LinkedIn, Ellis’ SAT math+verbal score was 1550. According to this site (http://iqcomparisonsite.com/SATIQ.aspx), that puts her at about a 150 IQ. Are we to understand that Vic Gundotra, Google VP, one of the targets against whom she leveled her complaints, was so intelligent that he couldn’t communicate front end engineering tasks to a person with a 150 IQ? Why has he not invented faster than light travel yet?

Kelly Ellis was never in charge of Google Plus. She was, according to her LinkedIn, working on a team that was in charge of some front end features of Google Plus

Kerry Ellis got poster girl treatment, giving me the impression she was in charge. Being the poster girl, would still be the most important member of the team, regardless of the poor guy who was nominally in charge.

Further, regardless of her SAT score, she was dumb as a post compared to regular engineers, let alone regular Google engineers.

Yes, I am suggesting an invisible intangible epidemic of firings and layoffs of smart engineers – not at all companies, but at all high status companies, all companies that spend substantial time and money interfacing with the government. The epidemic is invisible and intangible because those who are conducting the purge are embarrassed and self deceived.

Similarly, it was absolutely never policy of the Khmer Rouge to kill intellectuals. So likely the Khmer Rouge purge of intellectuals was, at the time, invisible and intangible. It was just that somehow at the end the intellectuals were not around any more. Similarly, it was never Soviet Party policy to purge the Jews from the Bolshevik party.

The SAT score puts her well into the 99th percentile of test takers. The 99th percentile of the population in terms of IQ is 137+. Incidentally, the SAT excludes the bottom 35% or so of the population.

The SAT used to be indicative of IQ. This caused it to have disparate impact against women, minorities and the poor. Throughout the twentieth century, starting in 1920, it and its predecessors were repeatedly adjusted to make it less discriminatory, the most recent changes being the most drastic. The current version of the SAT correlates only very weakly with IQ, therefore you cannot deduce her IQ from her SAT. Just as she got an affirmative action job, she got an affirmative action SAT.

The LSAT still correlates fairly well with IQ, though it also is being fixed.

I migrated to America some considerable time after getting my degrees, therefore never took the SAT.

As a general rule, questions on which boys score significantly higher than girls get dropped from the tests, so you can’t necessarily use any kind of scholastic aptitude test as a sex-neutral measure of IQ.

Your other points make sense and are impressively convincing in a universe where Kerry Ellis is just an ordinary person on an ordinary team. In a universe where she was in fact a poster girl, where Google made a big deal about the fact that it was not only hiring women, but actually having them genuinely do techie stuff, something smells mighty funny with your points.

It is kind of like all those posters showing that Stalin was just a regular guy, and being party secretary was just secretary, not God King Emperor. The existence of the posters reveals that the story they are telling is untrue.

Some evil misogynists take this one step further and say that even IQ test scores aren’t sex-neutral, because IQ tests are normalized so that the average man scores 100 and the average woman also scores 100.

Some evil anti-Semites take this two steps further and say that Jews are overrated by IQ tests as well because of their higher verbal IQ, but ELO scores and Nobel prizes do not seem to confirm that theory.

If that were the case, the SAT racial achievement gap would be closing.

As I said, the SAT still measures industriousness, motivation, conformity, and shared education culture, all of which have been greatly worsened by the culture of welfare and fatherlessness.

And, in fact, the racial achievement gap is closing, leading to frequent announcements that they have proven that the difference is entirely environmental. Each such victory seems to shift the point of failure around, rather than moving it. In Britain, they have been strikingly successful at closing the racial gap, by turning their white working class into wiggers. (“Wigger” being short for “white nigger”) If you cannot elevate blacks by giving them white culture, you can nonetheless lower whites by giving them wigger culture.

Similarly, efforts to close the maths achievement gap between boys and girls frequently succeed, which successes rely entirely on driving boys away from school.

Do you have any source for your assertion that Kelly Ellis was some sort of poster girl at Google? Or is this like with the German pilot who was supposedly an omega male Muslim convert but then turned out not to have been anything of the sort?

>As I said, the SAT still measures industriousness, motivation, conformity, and shared education culture, all of which have been greatly worsened by the culture of welfare and fatherlessness.

In which case, you would expect the gender gap to have closed and even inverted (girls being more prone to industriousness and conformity.)

In fact, this has only happened on the writing portion (which is bullshit.)

In which case, you would expect the gender gap to have closed and even inverted (girls being more prone to industriousness and conformity.)

The gender gap has been closed and inverted, in that substantially more women are getting high status degrees than men, and in that the SAT difference between men and women has been, if not inverted, very substantially reduced.

And, regardless, the changes in the SAT, most notably the removal of analogies, clearly mean that it no longer filters by IQ. Maybe whatever it is filtering on, females and minorities perform poorly on as well, but it is simply no longer an effective measure of intelligence.

It is a lot easier to foul up the correlation between test results and what you want to measure, than to create a plausible looking test that gives the same results for males and females and blacks and whites.

My attempts to find Kelly (not “Kerry”) Ellis being promoted by Google as a poster girl prior to the current scandal (search time range from September 2010-September 2014) netted about four articles, each one being something along the lines of “20 women working at Google.”

Reread your source. Each girl is the poster girl of a particular high tech company. She is Google’s poster girl, the other nine preceding her are the nine poster girls of nine other companies.

I would thank you if in future before posting “corrections” with insults and doing a victory dance to celebrate your “correction”, you tried to check your sources more carefully.

Repeating: She is was a poster girl. She was Google’s poster girl. The existence of poster girls reveals that all the official evidence you are relying on is worthless, much as the existence of Stalin posters revealed that all the official evidence about how the Soviet Union supposedly functioned was worthless.

When the Soviet Union was a going concern, Academia and the CIA believed the official story based on official evidence, and complained that those ignorant people outside academia were using the iron curtain as an excuse to make up hateful stories about the Soviet Union, stories based on anecdotes and subjective impressions. But over and over again, it was revealed that the outsiders had it right, that anecdotes and impressions were surprisingly reliable, and official truth totally unreliable.

One mention each in an article on CBS, where she is in 10th place, and about three articles in third rate sources. Over 4 years. Some poster girl. Unless you have other sources, this is mighty thin gruel.

I also like how you proclaimed her to have been put in charge of Google Plus (without any evidence) and responsible for its failure (G+ certainly didn’t fail because some front end team screwed up their JS.) Why don’t you just blame her for the Challenger disaster? She was in charge of gaskets at NASA, no?

With the SAT, you’re moving goalposts furiously. You said the SAT no longer correlated with IQ, but with diligence, having been castrated to fix the gender gap. I said that if this were the case, the gender gap on the SAT would have inverted. You said, it has-more women are going to college. Yeah, ok, and crop yields have fallen in Manitoba. But that’s not what we were discussing and you know it.

She is not in tenth place. Google is in tenth place. She is the Google poster girl, in a list of big firms giving the poster girl for each big firm. I explained this before. You are obstinately stupid, neither amending your position, defending it, nor retreating from it.

With the SAT, you’re moving goalposts furiously. You said the SAT no longer correlated with IQ, but with diligence

I don’t know what the SAT is correlated with. I do know it no longer correlates substantially with IQ. I also know that the reason for the changes that reduced the correlation with IQ were explicitly stated to be improve the performance of women and minorities.

It is hard to make a test that correlated with things that matter, when everyone is trying to game the test. So, quite possibly the SAT no longer correlates with anything interesting, as a result of the test writers facing too many contradictory demands. But whatever it correlates with, the correlation with IQ is now rather weak.

You say the changes failed to improve the performance of women and minorities. Maybe, maybe not. Not impressed by your evidence. But whether or not the changes improved the performance of women and minorities, the explicit and overtly stated intent was to improve the performance of women and minorities, and the actual effect was to substantially reduce the correlation with IQ.

In our conversation about the book of Ruth, it became rather obvious that I was shooting well above your intellectual level. You argued that according to the Rabbis, Ruth did not fuck Boaz when in bed in the dark with Boaz, while I was arguing that according to the book of Ruth, Ruth was available for fucking on demand when in bed in the dark with a half drunk Boaz, “lay thee down; and he will tell thee what thou shalt do” regardless of whether Boaz fucked her or not.

But, due to your conspicuous intellectual limitations, conversation never got that far, never got to the point where it would be possible to argue how the Jews of King David’s time, the intended audience of the Book of Ruth, interpreted Hebrew laws governing female behavior. Of course, I supposed it is crimestop rather than flat out stupidity, but I am seeing exactly the same crimestop when it comes to the SAT. Crimestop all over the place is indistinguishable from actual stupidity.

You have crimestop when you face evidence that Jewish Orthodox law has changed substantially, even when it changes right in front of your face, and you have crimestop when the Cathedral meddles with the SAT for political purposes, and you have crimestop when you see a list of poster girls.

If you were actually half smart, you would be able to produce some half smart rationalization for Ruth getting into bed with Boaz consistent with twentieth century interpretations of Jewish law, and some half smart rationalization for a list of poster girls. But instead you just flat out barefaced deny that Ruth getting into bed in the dark with the half drunk Boaz is sexual, and just flat out barefaced deny that a list of poster girls is a list of poster girls.

B, the basic problem is that whenever you run into an undeniable fact you don’t like, for example the SAT is no longer indicative of IQ, Kelly was a poster girl, Ruth was acting seductively and ready to spread her legs on demand, you proclaim victory and spew insults.

And that is why I don’t let go. I just keep on reiterating that you are dishonestly denying what is in front of your face, because you not only deny the undeniable, which lots of people do, but you insult me while denying the undeniable.

I will let go of these debates if you stop insulting me to cover the fact that you lost them.

When I am wrong about something, I say I was wrong, retreat and move on. When you are wrong about something, you announce total victory and spray insults.

We have anecdotal evidence. We have Wasenlightened, a Google employee, who tells us that your theory is simply wrong. Instead of adjusting your theory, you explain that Wasenlightened has false consciousness.

Wasenlightened also tells us that not a single person at Google can speak truth about the incident, which is not equivalent to saying that my theory is “simply” wrong. It is more like he is saying that my account lacks nuance.

Obviously, something bad would happen to any Google employee who speaks truth about the incident.

Well then, something bad would happen to any Google employee who speaks in overly clever rationalizations about the incident, for such excessive cleverness is likely to be mistaken for speaking truth, as happened to Larry Summers.

So yes, I think Wasenlightened has false consciousness, in that he admits the larger part of the truth, while, not exactly denying, but rather sort of quibbling at, a part of the truth that the larger part of the truth implies.

Wasenlightened also says contradictory things – politically correct things, and horribly politically incorrect things, and when called on it, explains he did not quite mean the politically correct thing in quite that sense. Maybe he did not, or maybe in order to survive at Google, he has doublethink down to a fine art, and sometimes his Google persona bleeds over into his Wasenlightened persona.

If the PC purges as mild as Wasenlightened sometimes says, why is Wasenlightened as terrorized as he is?

And if as mild as Wasenlightened says, then still not very mild at all

>She is not in tenth place. Google is in tenth place. She is the Google poster girl, in a list of big firms giving the poster girl for each big firm.

Poster children are not, generally speaking, used once and forgotten. The proponent agency typically gets mileage out of them, building sub-brand recognition, etc. Here, she popped up on some random list, once.

>I don’t know what the SAT is correlated with.

It’s a standardized test of mental tasks. The test takers spread out on a bell curve, where blacks score a standard deviation below whites, who score a standard deviation below asians, and where women cluster closer to the center and have an average slightly below that of men. What could such a test possibly correlate with? Could be ANYTHING. Propensity to drive a Japanese car, consistency of earwax…anything.

>I do know it no longer correlates substantially with IQ.

You “know” that because MENSA no longer accepts it. On the other hand, MENSA doesn’t accept the ASVAB, either. And the ASVAB does correlate with IQ. One of its components, the GT, for instance, is a straightforward IQ test.

I noted your attempt to deflect this into another Biblical debate. I repeat-I am not interested in debating the Bible with you, because it’s neither productive nor interesting. You’re not familiar with the source material and you demonstrate a postmodernist sort of dishonesty when familiarized with its details. Explaining the same thing five times to somebody who is determined not to get it is quite tedious.

As I noted earlier, you won’t address my other points because you’ve got nothing to say.

You claimed that Ellis had been put in charge of G+, that she had a man on her team who was so far above her intellectually that she couldn’t comprehend what he was saying, and that she thus is claiming she was harassed, and that this is so common that preemptive firings of dumb female engineers’ male coworkers are ubiquitous.

I brought clear facts showing that she was not in charge of anything but was on a minor sub-team in G+, that she’d worked with seven male team members during her time at Google, and that all of them are still there, so apparently have not been preemptively fired, and that she hadn’t filed her complaint against any of them but against people several steps above her in the food chain.

Now, all these facts were accessible with about five minutes of research and three clicks, so I assume that you were unaware of them because you didn’t wish to be aware of them. Who needs facts when we have a beautiful theory?

Now that I’ve brought them up, you are ignoring them/responding with a photo of Ezhov and some blather about the CIA and the USSR. Am I to understand that you’re implying that Google has gone back and edited Ellis’ LinkedIn page and her search results from 2010-2014? Even more hilariously, you state that we should believe you over stupid facts because only anecdotal evidence from the USSR showed the true picture, in the same exact thread where you preemptively dismiss the veracity of Wasenlightened’s anecdotal evidence. At this point, if you wrote that the sky was blue, I’d feel compelled to doublecheck.

Poster children are not, generally speaking, used once and forgotten. The proponent agency typically gets mileage out of them, building sub-brand recognition, etc. Here, she popped up on some random list, once.

When Google+ was proposed, the only google engineer named was Kelly Ellis And that was pretty much the way it was until recent developments. If a Google engineer was named, the name was apt to be Kelly Ellis. Sounded like engineering at Google was all female and all Kelly Ellis.

I had heard of her often enough in connection with Google+, before she started charging Google with insensitivity to women. They got plenty of use out of her, along the general lines that “women at Google are doing big important things, hey look at Kelly Ellis”

I do know [the SAT] no longer correlates substantially with IQ.

You “know” that because MENSA no longer accepts it.

I know it because I know some of the changes. Which you evidently do not.

MENSA doesn’t accept the ASVAB, either. And the ASVAB does correlate with IQ. One of its components, the GT, for instance, is a straightforward IQ test.

One of its components. That is not enough to give a very strong correlation with IQ.

And you need a strong correlation to draw a conclusion about Kelly Ellis’s IQ, given that she was selected for being a high scoring female – on a test redesigned to produce some high scoring females.

Now, all these facts were accessible with about five minutes of research and three clicks, so I assume that you were unaware of them because you didn’t wish to be aware of them. Who needs facts when we have a beautiful theory?

Nah, I was unaware of them because I was aware she was a poster girl, and when you are in the vicinity of a poster girl, none of these facts are likely to matter much. Who was the guy who was supposedly her boss? You did not see his face advertising Google+.

I noted your attempt to deflect this into another Biblical debate. I repeat-I am not interested in debating the Bible with you,

I would let you abandon the Ruth debate were it not that whenever you lose the argument, you cover your retreat with insults and proclaim victory, exactly as you are now doing in the Kelly case.

Explaining the same thing five times to somebody who is determined not to get it is quite tedious.

Says the man who refuses to admit we are discussing Ruth’s sexual availability, not whether Boaz used her sexually.

When you have lost the argument, you resort to childish insults. You should just fall silent.

You not only have not explained, or explained away, Ruth’s sexual availability five times. You have not explained it once.

Ruth wants Boaz’s favor. Her mother in law tells her to get into bed with Boaz and do whatever he tells her. (A procedure well known to be highly effective.) Ruth proceeds to do so, in the dark, with Boaz half drunk. It is possible that Boaz refrained from making sexual demands, but what would lead Ruth or her mother in law to think that Boaz was unlikely to make sexual demands when Ruth and her mother in law are doing their best to tempt him to make those demands?

I will keep bringing up the Ruth debate every time you proclaim victory with accompanying childish insults.

If Kelly is a poster girl, none of your arguments are relevant, so you just flat out deny she was a poster girl, just as you just flat out deny that there was anything sexual with Ruth getting into bed with Boaz. And you do not make actual arguments that Kelly was not a poster girl nor that Ruth was not sexual, you just repeat the assertion with insults for emphasis.

It is easy to test for any quality or characteristic, provided the test does not matter. As soon as the results of the test matter, everyone games the test, so that it becomes very very difficult to test for that quality or characteristic.

Actually Feynman likely failed at communicating with the 130 IQ physics class that took his course. His books are widely revered, and I personally love them, but they are not used as texts because they are over the heads of the students, even the majority of physics students at Caltech I believe.

>I had heard of her often enough in connection with Google+, before she started charging Google with insensitivity to women. They got plenty of use out of her, along the general lines that “women at Google are doing big important things, hey look at Kelly Ellis”

When I search for Google+ and Kelly Ellis, I get a scant handful of results.

>I know it because I know some of the changes. Which you evidently do not.

The main change was removing analogies, x is to y as a is to…

What remained was vocabulary questions, reading comprehension questions, grammar questions, etc. I tutor the SAT occasionally, so am quite familiar with the components. Now, we know that things like height and driving skills correlate with IQ-but reading comprehension doesn’t? OK.

>One of its components. That is not enough to give a very strong correlation with IQ.

That’s preposterous. The other components include things like mechanical aptitude, mathematics, reading comprehension, spatial reasoning, all correlating very highly with IQ.

>You not only have not explained, or explained away, Ruth’s sexual availability five times. You have not explained it once.

What does “sexual availability” mean? Boaz specifically praised her for not approaching one of the younger men. She specifically requested that he redeem her through marriage. The institution of levirate marriage does not consist of a man who may or may not be the designated redeemer (Boaz wasn’t) sleeping with the widow in the middle of the night. Among other things, for a Jewish marriage to be kosher, you need two witnesses. What possible advantage would sleeping with him have given Ruth? In a patriarchal society, sleeping with someone outside marriage is not a good way to get him to marry you, especially if it’s to his disadvantage.

The obvious answer is that Ruth approached Boaz because her situation was desperate. For a woman, especially in as desperate a position as Ruth’s, it is difficult to approach a man, so she did it at the only time when she could do so discreetly, in the middle of the night on the threshing floor. Since you associate discretion with illicit activity, it would be difficult for me to convince you that it has its place in licit but sensitive activity as well.

>Ruth wants Boaz’s favor. Her mother in law tells her to get into bed with Boaz and do whatever he tells her. (A procedure well known to be highly effective.) Ruth proceeds to do so, in the dark, with Boaz half drunk.

>It is possible that Boaz refrained from making sexual demands, but what would lead Ruth or her mother in law to think that Boaz was unlikely to make sexual demands when Ruth and her mother in law are doing their best to get him to make those demands?

They are not. Ruth specifically asks to be married. “Spread thy garment over thy handmaiden.” In the Torah, on the rare occasions that a woman approaches someone for sex, she is very explicitly described as doing so.

Why do they think that Boaz will act honorably? Because he is a man of valor, and the expression is used in the Torah not for someone who swings a big sword very fast but for someone who is morally upright. And because of what he said to Ruth in Ruth 2:

10 Then she fell on her face, and bowed down to the ground, and said unto him: ‘Why have I found favour in thy sight, that thou shouldest take cognizance of me, seeing I am a foreigner?’
11 And Boaz answered and said unto her: ‘It hath fully been told me, all that thou hast done unto thy mother-in-law since the death of thy husband; and how thou hast left thy father and thy mother, and the land of thy nativity, and art come unto a people that thou knewest not heretofore.
12 The LORD recompense thy work, and be thy reward complete from the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to take refuge.’

These are the words of an honorable and G-d fearing man.

>I will keep bringing up the Ruth debate every time you proclaim victory with accompanying childish insults.

If you wish to answer my calling your arguments stupid by referring to another stupid argument you wish to make, be my guest.

>If Kelly is a poster girl, none of your arguments are relevant, so you just flat out deny she was a poster girl

You’re moving the null hypothesis. The onus is on you to prove that she was a poster girl, since that’s your assertion (you’ve quietly walked back the assertion that she had been put in charge of Google Plus, wisely.)

You linked to two articles where she is mentioned in conjunction with Google Plus. Both refer to a YouTube video that was put out by Google, which is the only one I’ve been able to find, where she talks about +. In one of the articles, Ellis is not referred to with a gendered pronoun, so the reader can’t even tell she’s a female. The other one refers to “her,” but there is absolutely no emphasis on “female engineers at Google” or anything of the sort.

What remained was vocabulary questions, reading comprehension questions, grammar questions, etc. I tutor the SAT occasionally, so am quite familiar with the components. Now, we know that things like height and driving skills correlate with IQ-but reading comprehension doesn’t? OK.

If the test did not matter, so people did not prep for it, it would indeed measure reading comprehension, which is highly correlated with IQ. If, however, you check out books about “how to ace the SAT”, they tend to recommend methods giving the right answers on reading comprehension without the inconvenient waste of time involved in actually comprehending the passage. The passage generally preaches one of a very small set of politically correct moral lessons, so if you memorize all the standard moral lessons, you can figure out which one it is by picking up on a rather small set of keywords. Having recognized the moral lesson, you can usually then get the right answer by applying the simple principle “Two legs bad, four legs good Bahh Baah Baa”.

>It is possible that Boaz refrained from making sexual demands, but what would lead Ruth or her mother in law to think that Boaz was unlikely to make sexual demands when Ruth and her mother in law are doing their best to get him to make those demands?

They are not. Ruth specifically asks to be married.

Marriage in the sense of today’s Judaism did not exist in that time. One acquired a woman by purchase or inheritance or trade or some such, and having acquired her, one “married” her by taking her to bed. Which is exactly what Ruth is trying to get Boaz to do. No witnessed contract between the man and the woman, only between the man and the previous owner, usually the father, of the woman. No witnessed vows. No witnessed consent. Ruth is asking to be married in that fashion – that when Boaz has sex with her then and there, he shall take responsibility for her protection and welfare.

Ruth asks this in bed. In the dark. With Boaz half drunk.

Your version, with Jews practicing Christian derived Pauline marriage, a modern Jewish rite derived from an ancient Christian rite derived from a Roman rite, does not make sense in bed, in the dark. That these actions are taking place in bed in the dark makes no sense in the context of Christian derived marriage, only make sense if Ruth is arguing she is already Boaz’s property (“your handmaiden”), and seeking sex on the spot, right then and there, for an upgrade from servant to wife.

Because that is in fact how people married back then, and if you suppose that they were marrying Christian style, and just neglected to mention the fact, their behavior makes no sense. In particular, the behavior of Ruth and Boaz makes no sense.

What does “sexual availability” mean? Boaz specifically praised her for not approaching one of the younger men. She specifically requested that he redeem her through marriage.

You argument is circular. You project modern Jewish marriage, derived from Christian marriage, which was derived from Roman marriage, onto the Hebrews. But the point of my argument is that the projection does not fit. If Ruth seeking Christian type marriage, would not do it at night and in bed. Hebrew type marriage, on the other hand … Ruth’s behavior is very reasonable, straightforward, and appropriate behavior for a woman seeking Hebrew type marriage.

>If, however, you check out books about “how to ace the SAT”, they tend to recommend methods giving the right answers on reading comprehension without the inconvenient waste of time involved in actually comprehending the passage. The passage generally preaches one of a very small set of politically correct moral lessons, so if you memorize all the standard moral lessons, you can figure out which one it is by picking up on a rather small set of keywords.

This is simply untrue. I teach this stuff and have gone through the books. While the source material may be politically correct To Kill A Mockingbird type stuff, the questions do accurately test reading comprehension, the ability to use a word properly in context, grammar, inference about the author’s intent, etc., without requiring moral judgement.

>Marriage in the sense of today’s Judaism did not exist in that time. One acquired a woman by purchase or inheritance or trade or some such, and having acquired her, one “married” her by taking her to bed.

This is, as I’ve pointed out, not true. You know the Torah poorly, and consider yourself at liberty, if it speaks cursorily about a certain aspect of life, to interpret it as you wish.

In reality, in the Torah there is a clear distinction between a wife and a concubine. And there are indications of a formal ceremony. Ruth speaks of being covered by Boaz’ garment. This is a reference to the chuppah, an integral part of the marriage ceremony. And the chuppah is mentioned by Yoel the Prophet: Gather the people, prepare the congregation, assemble the elders, gather the infants and the sucklings; let a bridegroom come out of his chamber and a bride from her canopy. King David mentions the bridal chamber in Psalm 19.

By the time that the Sages wrote the Talmud, which codified existing practices, Jews had been marrying through a contract, with witnesses, a chuppah, etc., as long as they could remember. The Elephantine Tablets, from the 6th century BCE, show Jews marrying this way (I’ve mentioned this about 5 times, with no reaction from you other than to claim that the Jews living in Elephantine must have gotten it from the Persians.)

>That these actions are taking place in bed in the dark makes no sense in the context of Christian derived marriage, only make sense if Ruth is arguing she is already Boaz’s property (“your handmaiden”), and seeking sex on the spot, right then and there, for an upgrade from servant to wife.

Having grown up in a deracinated society, you may be forgiven for not knowing that civilized people refer to each other in a formal way (“my lord”, “my lady”, “his honor” and so forth can still occasionally be heard in Israeli society, not only in court rooms but also in buses.) “Your servant” or “your handmaiden” is an expression of humility or politeness. For instance, Obadiah meets Elijah the prophet and refers to himself as “your servant”, although this is not literally the case.

>Because that is in fact how people married back then, and if you suppose that they were marrying Christian style, and just neglected to mention the fact, their behavior makes no sense. In particular, the behavior of Ruth and Boaz makes no sense.

Boaz took her to the gate, where the court sat, and married her before witnesses. He specifically said:

9 And Boaz said unto the elders, and unto all the people: ‘Ye are witnesses this day, that I have bought all that was Elimelech’s, and all that was Chilion’s and Mahlon’s, of the hand of Naomi.
10 Moreover Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, have I acquired to be my wife, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance, that the name of the dead be not cut off from among his brethren, and from the gate of his place; ye are witnesses this day.’

From this you derive that back then people didn’t marry before witnesses but married through private copulation. And you repeatedly point to this story as proof that the Jews don’t know what their Torah says and twist it in all sort of ways. Well, your exegetical method is certainly…original. Perhaps next you will attempt to prove to me that in ancient Israel, male adultery was fine and female adultery was punished by death, and use Hosea and his wife Gomer as an example?

(by the way, in Hosea G-d actually says “I will not punish your daughters when they commit harlotry, nor your daughters-in-law when they commit adultery; for they themselves consort with lewd women, and they sacrifice with harlots; and the people that is without understanding is distraught.”)

>You argument is circular. You project modern Jewish marriage, derived from Christian marriage, which was derived from Roman marriage, onto the Hebrews.

The opposite. I assume that the Jews, who were marrying with a contract and witnesses in the 6th century BCE and in the 2nd century BCE, and do so today were doing so in the 10th century BCE also, and that if the Torah doesn’t spell out the details, it’s for the same reason that it doesn’t spell out the details of tefillin, kosher slaughter and a hundred other commandments which are either alluded to or mentioned briefly-these things were a matter of practice and living tradition, and everyone knew how they were done. And then I notice that in fact Boaz marries Ruth with witnesses the very next day, and nobody says this is something out of the ordinary. YOUR argument is circular. You invent a form of marriage which is indistinguishable from baboon coupling, and below even concubinage (which the Torah treats as completely distinct from marriage,) and not finding an explicit description of marriage, project it onto the text and proclaim that this is exactly how it was, though you have absolutely zero positive evidence.

As always, when refuted by the evidence that you yourself quote, you just spray insults in place of arguments like an angry child

The witnesses do not witness Ruth and Boaz making a contract with each other, they do not witness an exchange of vows (Christian type marriage, practiced by modern Christianized Jews)

They witness Boaz acquiring Ruth from the two other people who could arguably have a legal claim to own her. They witness that he owns her, and can therefore rightly have sex with her.

And so it is with every marriage in the Old Testament. No exchange of vows. Consent is irrelevant.

The story of Ruth is particularly telling since the behavior of Ruth and Boaz makes no sense if we assume that Christian type weddings were taking place invisibly but somehow the Old Testament never mentioned them. It only makes sense if people did what they said they were doing, did what Boaz says he is doing, were doing what the laws of Genesis and Deuteronomy and the example of the patriarchs command them to do.

If Christian type weddings normative, Ruth’s behavior is unchaste, and is outrageous and unreasonable. If marriage by a man having sex with his rightful property, usually assigned to him by his parents with orders to get working on grandchildren (no consent by either the man or the woman), Ruth’s behavior is chaste and virtuous.

If Christian type wedding normative, Boaz does not need whatshisname, the closer kinsman, to resign his inheritance right to Ruth. Ruth can simply reject it.

Your argument is that people in the Old Testament are having Christian type weddings and just never mentioning it. But, if having Christian type weddings, their behavior makes no sense. If Christian type weddings, Boaz would not need the consent of anonymous. He would need the consent of Ruth. He would not need the elders to witness anonymous relinquish all claims to Ruth and Naomi, and to witness Naomi give Ruth to Boaz. He would need the elders to witness Ruth’s vows. No such witness, no such vows, no such vows, no such consent. Marriage occurs by having sex with one’s property.

So Ruth, attempting to seduce Boaz, is indeed asking him to marry her. Exactly as depicted.

I recall on the SAT one of the multiple choice answers was sometimes politically incorrect in a funny way, therefore obviously wrong, though one feels a strange temptation to mark that answer. Not enough of those to make a significant difference though.

I believe the essay scoring (infamous for “quantity > quality”), and the sheer length of the test, which turns it into more of an endurance exercise, are more responsible.

The scoring for the essay and the writing section in general is pretty widely disregarded as not reflecting anything very interesting in particular (there’s a reason that Ellis lists math+verbal on her linkedin and leaves out the writing section-she knows nobody cares). The essay has to be written in a very specific way. Past a certain point, quantity is not of benefit. The idea is to show that you can, given 25 minutes, plan an argument with an intro paragraph, a conclusion and 2-3 supporting paragraphs (or two supporting and one anticipating an objection,) 1 point per paragraph, and then execute reasonably well.

Most people are quite dumb, and therefore there is a lot of slack here.

>The witnesses do not witness Ruth and Boaz making a contract with each other, they do not witness an exchange of vows (Christian type marriage, practiced by modern Christianized Jews)

You are confusing the issue. Our marriage is indeed a covenant between the man and woman. Vows are not exchanged in the Christian sense, and there is no flaming wedding planner, but it is a covenant and not the acquisition of livestock.

For instance, the Prophets continue speak of the relationship between Israel and G-d as a marriage. And this marriage is a covenant, not an acquisition of property. Thus, G-d says through Ezekiel:

““Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness. I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord God, and you became mine” (16:8).

Understand? He is entering into a covenant with a partner, not acquiring a sheep.

And what is the marriage supposed to be? Hosea says ““In that day, declares the Lord, you will call Me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call Me ‘my master.’ ”

Got it? Not ba’al, “master or owner,” but ish, “husband.” The distinction is clear.

And that’s what a marriage is supposed to be in the Torah. A covenant between (unequal) partners, not the purchase of a piece of livestock.

>They witness Boaz acquiring Ruth from the two other people who could arguably have a legal claim to own her.

Oh? Whom does Boaz say he acquires Ruth from?

Let me make it easier for you. He says to the kinsman “‘What day thou buyest the field of the hand of Naomi–hast thou also bought of Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of the dead, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance?’

“Of Ruth”-Ruth is her own owner. She is not a slave.

>They witness that he owns her, and can therefore rightly have sex with her.

You fail to understand the institution, of Levirate marriage, for the sixth month straight. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for you to grasp. The widow is not a piece of property to be inherited. She is a person to be redeemed, and holds the inheritance of the deceased in trust. The redeemer has an obligation to her and to the deceased. He’s not getting something-he is fulfilling an obligation, which may be a heavy one.

I notice you don’t address the difference between a concubine and a wife.

I notice you don’t address the difference between a concubine and a wife.

A wife has certain rights. A concubine has somewhat lesser rights.

And an ox also has rights, though somewhat lesser rights.

Christian marriage is contractual. Most of world did not practice contractual marriage until recently. What commonly happened in India and Japan was that parents would say “This is your wife. This is your husband. Now get making grandchildren.” Seemed to work pretty well, not “Lower than baboons”

The Hebrews did not practice chattel slavery of wives. Neither did they practice contractual marriage. The marriage of Isaac and Rebekah only makes sense in a society where neither male nor female consent was normative or required for marriage. The marriage of Ruth and Boaz only makes sense in a society female consent is not required for marriage – where Boaz cannot marry Ruth because she is arguably already property of whathisname, where if whathisname sticks to his guns, Ruth, and Naomi’s inheritance, winds up with whatshisname, exactly as directly stated in Genesis and Deuteronomy.

And what they did practice was substantially closer to chattel slavery of wives than it was to contractual marriage.

You fail to understand the institution, of Levirate marriage, for the sixth month straight. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for you to grasp. The widow is not a piece of property to be inherited. She is a person to be redeemed,

The Old Testament has provision for the man to refuse. It has no provision for the widow to refuse. So you have cooked up a rule that if the widow informally and unofficially refuses, then the man must officially and formally refuse.

But this rule makes no sense except as a talmudic excuse for evading the plain and clear meaning of the words.

Yes, she is not chattel property. But her consent, according to the plain meaning of the words, and according to the way you do the ritual today, is legally irrelevant, and the behavior of Ruth and Boaz shows that this is how the Hebrews of that day interpreted it.

Oh? Let’s play this game. Where in the Torah are their respective rights listed? Or are you just making things up?

>And an ox also has rights, though somewhat lesser rights.

Not in Judaism it doesn’t.

>Christian marriage is contractual. Most of world did not practice contractual marriage until recently. What commonly happened in India and Japan was that parents would say “This is your wife. This is your husband. Now get making grandchildren.” Seemed to work pretty well, not “Lower than baboons”

We are not Hindus or Japanese, thank G-d. I fail to see their relevance to us. Perhaps the Yanomano Indians sell their women for shiny beads, but that is not relevant to how Hebrews did it 3000 years ago either.

>The Hebrews did not practice chattel slavery of wives. Neither did they practice contractual marriage.

I just quoted you several places in the Prophets where they explicitly referred to marriage as a covenant. I also referred you (about 7 times now) to the Elephantine Papyri, which have formalized marriage contracts from the 6th century BCE.

>The Old Testament has provision for the man to refuse. It has no provision for the widow to refuse. So you have cooked up a rule that if the widow informally and unofficially refuses, then the man must officially and formally refuse.

She can’t refuse because she has an obligation to her deceased husband which she incurred through marrying him. Not because she is like his chest of drawers. If it were the latter case, then her deceased husband’s father (for instance) would get her. Which is not the case. Also, if she were like a chest of drawers, it would be irrelevant whether the deceased had left behind issue. For instance, according to the Torah, if the deceased had a child (with her or with another wife or with a concubine,) there is no Levirate marriage. She has no obligation to continue his line, his line already exists, that’s that (and she is a free woman.) But according to your interpretation, she is property, so should be inherited by the next guy in line. We see that your interpretation contradicts the plain meaning.

>But her consent, according to the plain meaning of the words, and according to the way you do the ritual today, is legally irrelevant, and the behavior of Ruth and Boaz shows that this is how the Hebrews of that day interpreted it.

For the 78th time, she consented to Levirate marriage in the event that her husband would die with no offspring beforehand, when she married him.

Your rituals of marriage, and in particular of levirate marriage, only make sense as a talmudic workaround on top of earlier rituals where female consent was irrelevant. You sneak female consent and female initiated divorce in by the back door.

I just quoted you several places in the Prophets where they explicitly referred to marriage as a covenant.

They do not refer to marriage as covenant. They refer to the relationship between God and Israel as a covenant, and as a marriage. Both are metaphors, and it is not apparent that they are equivalent metaphors. A covenant you agree to, but it is obvious that the individual Jew does not need to agree to the relationship with God – and neither does the wife need to agree with her relationship to her husband.

I also referred you (about 7 times now) to the Elephantine Papyri, which have formalized marriage contracts from the 6th century BCE.

And, as I remarked earlier, this tells us much about Persian marriage in the sixth century BCE. The Jews that wrote the Elephantine Papyri practiced Persian polytheism, with Yahweh one god among the Persian gods, just as today’s Jews practice Christian descended progressivism.

Just as today’s Jews kiss progressive ass and beg that they be allowed to not marry gays because they love gays so very much, the Jews that wrote the Elephantine Papyri were kissing Persian polytheist ass asking that Yahweh be allowed among the Persian gods.

She can’t refuse because she has an obligation to her deceased husband which she incurred through marrying him. Not because she is like his chest of drawers. If it were the latter case, then her deceased husband’s father (for instance) would get her. Which is not the case. Also, if she were like a chest of drawers, it would be irrelevant whether the deceased had left behind issue.

The general principal that most socially conservative societies have followed is that sex is forbidden except it is compulsory. Well then, if she cannot refuse, and, as seems likely, Ruth was unaware of the existence of whathisname, then Ruth can bang Boaz like a barn door in a high wind, and still be entirely chaste, because that is the way most socially conservative societies work. You can have sex if it is compulsory.

The logic of institutions and societies, the way things normally work, is that if Boaz does not need Ruth’s consent, neither does he need a big ritual to witness consent and vows. He can just bang her. And if he can just bang her, she can just bang him and still be a chaste and virtuous woman.

If Ruth cannot refuse Boaz then, the way most societies normally work, sneaking into his bed to fuck him would be fine. Indeed waiting till he dozes off and has a night erection, then jumping his bones and riding him like a horse to a surprise happy awakening would be fine. The reason you have a problem with it is that you have cobbled Christian institutions of consent on top of Hebrew institutions of women as property.

And the reason Boaz had a problem with it was “And now it is true that I am thy near kinsman: howbeit there is a kinsman nearer than I.”

The layering reveals that Hebrew/Jewish institutions have changed over time.

[If she already has a son] she has no obligation to continue his line, his line already exists, that’s that (and she is a free woman.) But according to your interpretation, she is property, so should be inherited by the next guy in line.

The next guy in line is her son, who has an obligation to honor his mother – but she is still part of his household, and he is the man of the house, the owner of the house and property. Not what progressives think is a free woman. Indeed, the laws on rape reveal that they did not really have the concept of a free woman.

>The marriage of Ruth and Boaz only makes sense in a society female consent is not required for marriage – where Boaz cannot marry Ruth because she is arguably already property of whathisname, where if whathisname sticks to his guns, Ruth, and Naomi’s inheritance, winds up with whatshisname, exactly as directly stated in Genesis and Deuteronomy.

She is not the property of anyone. Since you have incredible difficulty reading, I will again quote Boaz:

3 And he said unto the near kinsman: ‘Naomi, that is come back out of the field of Moab, selleth the parcel of land, which was our brother Elimelech’s;
4 and I thought to disclose it unto thee, saying: Buy it before them that sit here, and before the elders of my people. If thou wilt redeem it, redeem it; but if it will not be redeemed, then tell me, that I may know; for there is none to redeem it beside thee; and I am after thee.’ And he said: ‘I will redeem it.’
5 Then said Boaz: ‘What day thou buyest the field of the hand of Naomi–hast thou also bought of Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of the dead, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance?’

At the moment that Boaz is speaking, he is asking the kinsman whether he wishes to buy the land from Naomi. It is not his property-it is hers. And then he asks whether the kinsman wishes to acquire from Ruth the obligation to raise the name of the dead upon his inheritance. At this moment, Ruth is not anyone’s property or wife. She is her own woman.

At the moment that Boaz is speaking, he is asking the kinsman whether he wishes to buy the land from Naomi. It is not his property-it is hers. And then he asks whether the kinsman wishes to acquire from Ruth the obligation to raise the name of the dead upon his inheritance. At this moment, Ruth is not anyone’s property or wife. She is her own woman.

No mention of acquiring from Ruth. You made that part up. If whathisname buys the land from Naomi, he buys Ruth, and Ruth has no say it it.

If Naomi can sell Ruth, Ruth is not her own woman.

And Naomi can not only sell Ruth, but must sell Ruth to whathisname, who has right of first refusal. If Naomi had a choice, would sell to Boaz.

The fact that Naomi cannot sell her daughter in law to anyone she pleases at public auction means that Ruth is not chattel property, and Naomi is not chattel property. But neither are they free, nor do they belong to themselves.

This is your obligation, not the right of the ox, just like you have an obligation to put fringes on the corners of your garments, but your garments don’t have a right to have fringes put upon them, just like you have an obligation to refrain from cutting down fruit trees in war, but the trees have no right not to be cut down.

>They do not refer to marriage as covenant. They refer to the relationship between God and Israel as a covenant, and as a marriage. Both are metaphors, and it is not apparent that they are equivalent metaphors.

Nonsense. They obviously refer to the relationship as a marriage of covenant.

>A covenant you agree to, but it is obvious that the individual Jew does not need to agree to the relationship with God – and neither does the wife need to agree with her relationship to her husband.

This is gibberish. In the Torah, we see over and over again that the individual Jew must also accept the relationship with G-d, and there are multiple reaffirmations of the covenant by the Jewish people-at Sinai, with King Josiah, at Purim, for some examples. And Israel is in the same exact prophetic passages referred to as a rebellious wife who is asked to return. Hence, Hosea the Prophet marries a prostitute, at G-d’s command, as a prophetic gesture (And the LORD said unto me: ‘Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend and an adulteress, even as the LORD loveth the children of Israel, though they turn unto other gods.) Hence, Isaiah says ” ‘Return, faithless people,’ declares the Lord, ‘for I am your husband’”. It’s a covenant, and both parties must be agreed.

>And, as I remarked earlier, this tells us much about Persian marriage in the sixth century BCE.

This is the No True Scotsman Fallacy exemplified. Please demonstrate similar Persian marriage contracts from the sixth century BCE. The fact is that marriage was viewed back then by Jews as a legal covenant, with female consent by lack of objection, just the way it was viewed in the second century CE and the way it is viewed today.

>The general principal that most socially conservative societies have followed is that sex is forbidden except it is compulsory.

I don’t think that what most non-Jewish societies do is a good predictor of what Jews do or did. But in any case, ALL socially conservative societies require a public ceremony for marriage. NONE marry by the bride and groom meeting in private and having sex.

>Well then, if she cannot refuse, and, as seems likely, Ruth was unaware of the existence of whathisname, then Ruth can bang Boaz like a barn door in a high wind, and still be entirely chaste, because that is the way most socially conservative societies work.

“Uhuhuhuh…yoo-ti-lize…hehhehheh…” Speaking of holy people crassly makes you sound crass and stupid.

>If Ruth cannot refuse Boaz then, the way most societies normally work, sneaking into his bed to fuck him would be fine. Indeed waiting till he dozes off and has a night erection, then jumping his bones and riding him like a horse to a surprise happy awakening would be fine.

Your pornographic fantasies are not very interesting.

And your logic is phenomenally stupid. In conservative societies, people do not get married by furtive copulation. No matter what their status is. Even those who are betrothed to each other, or those who were married to each other by a contract made by their parents while they were children. They have a wedding. And even concubines have some sort of formal, legally witnessed and mutually binding arrangement.

>The reason you have a problem with it is that you have cobbled Christian institutions of consent on top of Hebrew institutions of women as property.

The reason I have a problem with this is that it’s stupid. There are absolutely zero developed societies in existence where the way you become legally married to someone is by having sex with them in private. Zero.

>And the reason Boaz had a problem with it was “And now it is true that I am thy near kinsman: howbeit there is a kinsman nearer than I.”

Boaz didn’t sleep with her because he was a man of valor.

The layering reveals that Hebrew/Jewish institutions have changed over time.

>The next guy in line is her son, who has an obligation to honor his mother – but she is still part of his household, and he is the man of the house, the owner of the house and property.

You presume to lecture me on Torah while you don’t know what it says.

If the deceased had ANY children, with her or anybody else, sons or daughters, she is free of her obligation. And if she has a son, she doesn’t become his property. He inherits the property of the deceased, along with an obligation to support her, but she is free to e.g. marry whomever she wishes.

By the same argument, women and children in the of testament have no rights either.

And, indeed, I rather think they don’t. Your argument is reasonable, indeed convincing, but does not give the result you want – that women own themselves.

And your logic is phenomenally stupid. In conservative societies, people do not get married by furtive copulation. No matter what their status is. Even those who are betrothed to each other, or those who were married to each other by a contract made by their parents while they were children. They have a wedding. And even concubines have some sort of formal, legally witnessed and mutually binding arrangement.

Japanese did not have weddings till 1900, and their 1900 wedding, supposedly shinto, was, like the Jewish wedding, stolen wholesale from Christianity. Until MacArthur emancipated women, few Japanese got married in the supposed Shinto ceremony. After MacArthur emancipated women, they generally went all the way with a fake Christian wedding conducted by a fake Christian priest, a non Christian cosplaying a Christian priest.

The reason I have a problem with this is that it’s stupid. There are absolutely zero developed societies in existence where the way you become legally married to someone is by having sex with them in private. Zero.

By “developed” you mean conquered or dominated by Christendom. Romans had several different ways of getting legally married, one of which was to have sex with them in private – although the highest status form of marriage was to overtly contractual form on which Christian marriage is based. In the Republic, if the father failed to prevent his daughters from having sex, then they left the authority of the father, and came under authority of the man they had sex with. Later this changed, and having sex had less consequences.

If the deceased had ANY children, with her or anybody else, sons or daughters, she is free of her obligation.

I stand corrected. But what was the penalty for raping such a woman, for raping an unowned woman?

>No mention of acquiring from Ruth. You made that part up. If whathisname buys the land from Naomi, he buys Ruth, and Ruth has no say it it.

Unlike you, I know the source and don’t need to make anything up. ‘What day thou buyest the field of the hand of Naomi–hast thou also bought of Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of the dead, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance?’

Bought OF Ruth the Moabitess. Not bought Ruth the Moabitess. For the 28th time. The Hebrew is “me-eth,” meaning, to buy something from someone. So from Naomi he buys the field, from Ruth he buys the continuation of the name of the deceased upon his inheritance.

As I said, when she married Elimelech, she accepted upon herself the obligation to marry the next kinsman in the event that he died childless. Part and parcel of Torah marriage. Then she re-affirmed her commitment to that obligation when she decided to stay with Naomi and go back to Israel with her:

“And Ruth said: ‘Entreat me not to leave thee, and to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God”

and, of course, she is accepting upon herself all the Torah, which included this obligation (and actually, in those days they took it further than the Torah requirement, which only speaks of a brother, but here we have more distant kinsmen.)

>Indeed, Naomi does not get much say in either.

Naomi’s consent is obvious (given her situation) and doesn’t bear mentioning. There was obviously a deed/witnessing/legal transaction where she gave consent, but the Torah doesn’t bother with irrelevant details-we don’t even know how much Boaz gave her for the plot of land. For that matter, we don’t know much else about Boaz from the text-did he have other wives, children, how long he lived after the marriage, etc. Nor do we know anything about Obed, his son, or very much about Jesse.

Isn’t that strange? A normal, conservative society, when they tell the lineage of a king, they talk about what great warriors his father, grandfather etc. were. Jews talk about his great grandmother, who was a starving Moabite convert. Not to mention the stories of Tamar, his greatgreat…greatgrandmother, who had to pretend to be a prostitute to establish her deceased husband’s lineage and who prevailed against Judah, her father-in-law and the father of her children, and Ruth’s distant ancestors, Lot and his elder daughter. Difficult and shameful stories, told plainly. Not how the Nations do it. As I said, the way of the world is not generally our way.

>By the same argument, women and children in the of testament have no rights either.

A person who has an obligation owed to him has a right upon the obliged. An animal or object does not.

Children have rights. For instance, in Deuteronomy 21:
15 If a man have two wives, the one beloved, and the other hated, and they have borne him children, both the beloved and the hated; and if the first-born son be hers that was hated;
16. then it shall be, in the day that he causeth his sons to inherit that which he hath, that he may not make the son of the beloved the first-born before the son of the hated, who is the first-born;
17 but he shall acknowledge the first-born, the son of the hated, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath; for he is the first-fruits of his strength, the right of the first-born is his.

Women for sure has rights. Even a captive woman has rights:

10 When thou goest forth to battle against thine enemies, and the LORD thy God delivereth them into thy hands, and thou carriest them away captive,
11 and seest among the captives a woman of goodly form, and thou hast a desire unto her, and wouldest take her to thee to wife;
12 then thou shalt bring her home to thy house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails;
13 and she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thy house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month; and after that thou mayest go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife.
14 And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not deal with her as a slave, because thou hast humbled her.

And a Jewish girl who was sold by her father (for the purpose of marriage) has rights:

7 And if a man sell his daughter to be a maid-servant, she shall not go out as the men-servants do.
8 If she please not her master, who hath espoused her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed; to sell her unto a foreign people he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her.
9 And if he espouse her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters.
10 If he take him another wife, her food, her raiment, and her conjugal rights, shall he not diminish.
11 And if he do not these three unto her, then shall she go out for nothing, without money.

(“without money” means she doesn’t have to pay her master back, but he does have to pay her, as you must pay any Hebrew slave once their term of bondage is up)

Obviously, if even a captive non-Jewish woman has rights, not to mention a Hebrew handmaiden, a wife more so.

>Japanese did not have weddings till 1900, and their 1900 wedding, supposedly shinto, was, like the Jewish wedding, stolen wholesale from Christianity.

I have no idea if this is true or not, but suspect that it’s not. Even if it were, it would be irrelevant. (Interestingly, apparently in ancient Japan, the groom would go to live with the bride’s family after marriage.)

>By “developed” you mean conquered by Christendom. Romans had several different ways of getting legally married, one of which was to have sex with them in private – although the highest status form of marriage was to overtly contractual form on which Christian marriage is based.

By “developed” I mean “developed”. Hindus have weddings. Muslims have weddings. Ancient Greeks had weddings. What do you want? That’s how civilized societies do it. Otherwise, you would not be able to know who is married, who is a concubine, whose children are legitimate, who is divorced, etc. You have a public ceremony and throw a party. Then everybody knows there’s a change in legal status.

>I stand corrected. But what was the penalty for raping such a woman, for raping an unowned woman?

The same as for any violent assault. You have to pay damages for physical injury, for pain, for humiliation and for medical treatment. You don’t have to, obviously, pay for her virginity, nor can you be forced to marry her. What is the relevance of the question? You made the assertion that a widow is property and part of the estate of the deceased to be inherited, and I pointed out that if this were the case, then it would not be relevant whether the deceased had left a daughter with her or any children from any other marriages. Now what, you want to shift the goalposts?

>By the same argument, women and children in the of testament have no rights either.

A person who has an obligation owed to him has a right upon the obliged. An animal or object does not.

Are women and children actually persons in the Old Testament? It is not at all obvious that they are. A father has obligations to his wives and children but also obligations to his oxen.

10 When thou goest forth to battle against thine enemies, and the LORD thy God delivereth them into thy hands, and thou carriest them away captive,
11 and seest among the captives a woman of goodly form, and thou hast a desire unto her, and wouldest take her to thee to wife;
12 then thou shalt bring her home to thy house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails;
13 and she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thy house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month; and after that thou mayest go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife.
14 And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not deal with her as a slave, because thou hast humbled her.

A month just happens to be rather significant for resolving paternal uncertainty, and most laws about women are clearly intended, consciously or unconsciously, to reduce paternal uncertainty, in nearly all societies, and Hebrew laws more than most. Women are infamously quick to adapt to abduction. A month is excessive for adaption. Seven days is ample for a woman to fall in love with her abductor. But a month is what you need to resolve paternal uncertainty.

It says “don’t have sex with her”, not “don’t force sex on her”, so not her rights, nor any obligation to her welfare, but paternal certainty. And the need for such painful measures to ensure paternal certainty implies that before you took her into your home, likely a thousand other soldiers had their way with her. So, the intent of not having sex with her is unlikely to be to respect the welfare and preferences of the woman.

I would interpret the intent and original practice of this as “stop having sex with her for a month once you take her into your house, so that if it turns out she is pregnant in that month you can assume the pregnancy is likely one of the other thousand soldiers who had sex with her before you took her into your house, but if it turns out she is not pregnant in that month you then have paternal certainty thereafter.”

Similarly a rule on no reselling slave girls after having sex with them encourages paternal certainty – which benefits the slave girl, but that is not necessarily the primary purpose. Exodus 21:20-27 limits the punishment of slaves, but allows punishments are horrifically severe, and there is no requirement that the punishment be for anything important. If a man regularly beats his slave girl so severely that she passes out unconscious, a prohibition against reselling her does not benefit her all that much. In the context of Exodus 21:20-27, interpreting the no resale rule as if it was primarily intended to protect the rights of captives rather than the knowledge of the paternity of children is a stretch.

If the primary objective is paternal certainty, then not a right of the captive, but an obligation of the captor. That it says no sex, rather than no sex under pressure, implies an obligation of the captor rather than a right of the captive. The captive, suspecting herself pregnant already, and in the grip of Stockholm syndrome, will very likely want to eagerly jump her captor at any and every opportunity, but is instead forced to cut her hair, making her less attractive, when she wants to be as attractive as possible, and, if already pregnant, urgently needs to be as attractive as possible.

>Japanese did not have weddings till 1900, and their 1900 wedding, supposedly Shinto, was, like the Jewish wedding, stolen wholesale from Christianity.

I have no idea if this is true or not, but suspect that it’s not. Even if it were, it would be irrelevant. (Interestingly, apparently in ancient Japan, the groom would go to live with the bride’s family after marriage.)

In a severely patriarchal society, without consent, you don’t need a wedding to witness consent and vows, because the patriarch of the family simply tells the family who is married to whom, and you don’t need a big party celebrating the marriage to know whose children are legitimate and who children is not, because the father or grandfathers decide who is legitimate and who is not

Hence the absence of vows or big party in the marriage of Isaac and Rebekah.

Japanese women used to be emancipated in ancient times. Maybe they had weddings in those days. Then Japan, quite abruptly, became severely patriarchal, for reasons that everyone finds mysterious, or claims to find mysterious. In this period it was immensely important who was the emperor’s wife, and who was merely the emperor’s concubine, since the emperor’s brother in law or father in law tended to be the real power in the land. Nonetheless, who was married to whom was simply announced by family patriarchs, even for the emperor. The first recorded wedding in Japan was the emperor’s wedding in 1900, in a supposedly Shinto ceremony clearly stolen wholesale from Christianity. Subsequently the fashion of having formal weddings spread to the lower classes, but it never became really widespread until female emancipation in 1947.

>By “developed” you mean conquered by Christendom. Romans had several different ways of getting legally married, one of which was to have sex with them in private – although the highest status form of marriage was to overtly contractual form on which Christian marriage is based.

By “developed” I mean “developed”. Hindus have weddings. Muslims have weddings. Ancient Greeks had weddings. What do you want?

Not every society needs to have a wedding in every case for sex and children to be legitimate, and in a lot societies the “wedding” consisted of the patriarch of the bride speaking in front of family telling the groom he could have the daughter.

In Hindu society Arsha marriage and Prajapatya marriage consists of the patriarch formally giving the groom his daughter or a woman under his authority – but does not require family and witnesses to be present. These days Hindus have huge weddings, Daiva marriage, with priest officiating, but it seems that until quite recently, Daiva marriage was not all that usual.

Indeed until recently Hindus and the Christians were the only people into big weddings with lots of witnesses, and the Hindus were not all that into it. And the proof of this is that everyone’s wedding ceremony, except the Hindu Daiva ceremony, is stolen from the Christians. In particular, the “Muslim” wedding ceremony is two ceremonies, one copied wholesale from the Hindu Daiva ceremony and the other copied wholesale from the Christian ceremony, implying that Muslims did not have wedding ceremonies until some time after they conquered India, and probably not until some time after they were subjected to colonial and cultural domination by the Christian powers. Just as there is no mention of a wedding ceremony for Isaac and Rebekah, or any of the kings of Israel, there is no mention of any wedding ceremonies for the much married Mohammed.

Since the Hadiths tell us a lot about the wealth, importance, and power of his first wife, and of her romance and courtship of Mohammed, you would think that they would mention the wedding, if wedding there was. Seems that their wedding was, like the Hindu Pajapatya marriage, just a handshake between patriarchs.

Spartans had weddings but Athenians barely had them, at least not when they were an independent polity. An Athenian wedding consisted of the groom shaking hands with his father in law, and saying he will take care of the bride, with the immediate kin as witnesses. No big party, no excessively large pile of witnesses, no priests, no government officials – not really distinguishable from an ordinary family gathering.

Japan before 1900 was developed, and had no weddings even for the emperor, and not all Hindus had weddings until quite recently.

That’s how civilized societies do it. Otherwise, you would not be able to know who is married, who is a concubine, whose children are legitimate, who is divorced, etc. You have a public ceremony and throw a party. Then everybody knows there’s a change in legal status.

The patriarchs of the families make a deal, tell family the deal. If the bride has no patriarch – orphaned, widowed, abandoned, and her husband is the patriarch, he announces it before witnesses, but there is no requirement that he announce it in a timely manner. He announces it when he gets around to it, and she had better hope that he does get around to it.

>I stand corrected. But what was the penalty for raping such a woman, for raping an unowned woman?

The same as for any violent assault.

There do not seem to be any laws about coercing women, short of causing them injury.

Rape seldom involves overt violence. The woman thinks about resisting with teeth and claws, decides that might be an extremely bad idea, so either does not resist at all, or resists by means likely to be ineffectual. Also there is no sharp boundary between rape and seduction, since when women become sexually excited, they become physically weak, even if they are entirely unaware they are sexually excited, and would be horrified if they were aware of it. Seduction tends to involve a fair bit of physical domination, which again is not sharply distinguishable from bullying. Hence frequent joke that little girls have pigtails so that little boys can do bad things to their pigtails.

Because of the disparity in strength and violence between men and woman, a man can apply a great deal of pressure without actually needing to punch her in the face. Worst case from the rapists point of view, assuming the woman is not armed but nonetheless resists with a great deal of determination, is that he has to apply a submission hold, which does not result in any injury, just temporary pain and the implied threat of a great deal more pain and lasting injury. So when we look for evidence of violent rape, we look for evidence that the rapist got clawed and bitten, rather than that the women got beaten up. She usually did not get beaten up, because it is seldom necessary. A submission hold, followed by some diddling, suffices.

Further, old testament really does not have the concept of rape, but rather of improper sex. If the woman was not coerced, the man and the woman are both punished. If coerced, only the man. They don’t have a word for rape, have refer to it by describing an example.

What is the relevance of the question? You made the assertion that a widow is property and part of the estate of the deceased to be inherited, and I pointed out that if this were the case, then it would not be relevant whether the deceased had left a daughter with her or any children from any other marriages.

If deceased had children, his widow does not have to marry his brother. Does not follow she is free to marry whom she chooses, does not follow that she belongs to herself. That ancient Hebrews did not have a word for rape, nor any law prohibiting rape as such, nor any way of briefly expressing the concept, indicates that women were normatively under the protection and supervision of some male.

In Japan before 1947, and in large part in China (though China is a large place with many peoples and ways), the legal system ran through patriarchs. The unit of society from the point of view of administration and law enforcement was the family not the individual, and the patriarch represents the family to the state, and the state to the family. This appears to be how Hebrew society worked, and in such a society, women simply never belong to themselves. If their husband dies or ditches them, then in so far as they have any choice, they have a choice of returning to the authority of their birth family, or remaining under the authority of their husband’s family in a lower status role than wife.

“““Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness. I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord God, and you became mine” (16:8).

Understand? He is entering into a covenant with a partner, not acquiring a sheep.”

You couldn’t find support for that without and you became mine?

What’s that if not an expression of property? Even the parallel construction where a woman says a man becomes her husband is different because husband means one who cares for and cultivates his property.

Oh, brilliant, that. I guess it depends on what the meanings of the word “are” are.

You completely misunderstand the point of the quotes I brought. It’s not about paternity. It’s about whether you can humiliate someone. You are not allowed to sell the captive woman if you don’t want to marry her. You’ve humiliated her. You have to set her free.

>Similarly a rule on no reselling slave girls after having sex with them encourages paternal certainty – which benefits the slave girl, but that is not necessarily the primary purpose.

You are an idiot who can’t read plain text and has the gall to accuse others of twisting it. The slave girl in point is a minor who was purchased by her master for himself or his son to marry. Nobody had sex with her. The master changed his mind and doesn’t want to marry her or to marry her to his son. She is set free, no money paid. The issue is not paternal certainty. The issue is “because you have dealt faithlessly with her.” Can you deal faithlessly with an ox?

>Exodus 21:20-27 limits the punishment of slaves, but allows punishments are horrifically severe, and there is no requirement that the punishment be for anything important. If a man regularly beats his slave girl so severely that she passes out unconscious, a prohibition against reselling her does not benefit her all that much.

It is impossible to make a set of laws that would prohibit all cruelty, comprehensively. It is quite possible to stay within the letter of the law and act in very cruel and immoral ways. No matter how extensive the law is. From this, you conclude that the law condones cruelty. This is not the case. In Tractage Gittin page 58a of the Babylonian Talmud, there is a story of a man doing horrible things while not violating any law technically, which the Sages relate as the final sin which sealed the doom of Second Temple Israel:
Rab Judah said in the name of Rab: ‘What is signified by the verse, And they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage? A certain man once conceived a desire for the wife of his master, he being a carpenter’s apprentice. Once his master wanted to borrow some money from him. He said to him: Send your wife to me and I will lend her the money. So he sent his wife to him, and she stayed three days with him. He then went to him before her. Where is my wife whom I sent to you? he asked. He replied: I sent her away at once, but I heard that the youngsters played with her on the road. What shall I do? he said. If you listen to my advice, he replied, divorce her. But, he said, she has a large marriage settlement. Said the other: I will lend you money to give her for her Kethubah. So he went and divorced her and the other went and married her. When the time for payment arrived and he was not able to pay him, he said: Come and work off your debt with me. So they used to sit and eat and drink while he waited on them, and tears used to fall from his eyes and drop into their cups. From that hour the doom was sealed; some, however, say that it was for two wicks in one light.

Nontheless, cruelty is prohibited. A man who maims his slave, causing the loss of a tooth or eye or finger, must manumit him (and there are also damages.)

>In the context of Exodus 21:20-27, interpreting the no resale rule as if it was primarily intended to protect the rights of captives rather than the knowledge of the paternity of children is a stretch.

It says “you shall let her go free and you can’t sell her, for you have humbled her.” No mention of paternity. An explicit mention of her personal dignity. From which you conclude that the Torah cares about paternity but not personal dignity. And then have the nerve to accuse us of twisting it.

>If the primary objective is paternal certainty, then not a right of the captive, but an obligation of the captor. That it says no sex, rather than no sex under pressure, implies an obligation of the captor rather than a right of the captive. The captive, suspecting herself pregnant already, and in the grip of Stockholm syndrome, will very likely want to eagerly jump her captor at any and every opportunity, but is instead forced to cut her hair, making her less attractive, when she wants to be as attractive as possible, and, if already pregnant, urgently needs to be as attractive as possible.

What are you gibbering about? He had sex with her when he captured her. She might have slept with her husband and gotten pregnant the day before. It is irrelevant. He can marry her, whether she’s pregnant or not, whether she’s showing or not, etc.

>In a severely patriarchal society, without consent, you don’t need a wedding to witness consent and vows, because the patriarch of the family simply tells the family who is married to whom, and you don’t need a big party celebrating the marriage to know whose children are legitimate and who children is not, because the father or grandfathers decide who is legitimate and who is not

You are moving the goalposts. A wedding may or may not be needed, but a formal contract with witnesses is. Those children will go on and marry other people’s children in the community. Specifically in Judaism, illegitimate (meaning, the product of forbidden relations, not those of an unmarried woman) children may not marry legitimate ones.

>Hence the absence of vows or big party in the marriage of Isaac and Rebekah.

Were this the case (and I suspect that there was a formal ceremony/wedding, not mentioned for conciseness) it would not be relevant, since this was before the giving of the Torah. Laban, by the way, throws a wedding party for Jacob and Leah.

>The first recorded wedding in Japan was the emperor’s wedding in 1900, in a supposedly Shinto ceremony clearly stolen wholesale from Christianity.

I would like a source for this. Not that it bears any relevance to the price of tea in China or what Hebrews did 3000 years ago.

>Not every society needs to have a wedding in every case for sex and children to be legitimate, and in a lot societies the “wedding” consisted of the patriarch of the bride speaking in front of family telling the groom he could have the daughter.

In what societies? With sources, please.

>In Hindu society Arsha marriage and Prajapatya marriage consists of the patriarch formally giving the groom his daughter or a woman under his authority – but does not require family and witnesses to be present.

I would like a source. Wiki says that there is a wedding ceremony for Prajapatya marriage and is very cursory on Arsha marriage.

>The patriarchs of the families make a deal, tell family the deal. If the bride has no patriarch – orphaned, widowed, abandoned, and her husband is the patriarch, he announces it before witnesses, but there is no requirement that he announce it in a timely manner. He announces it when he gets around to it, and she had better hope that he does get around to it.

That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. In what civilized society do things function like this? Where does a guy just sleep with a woman and then unilaterally announces that they are married sometime later? With sources, please.

>There do not seem to be any laws about coercing women, short of causing them injury.

>Further, old testament really does not have the concept of rape, but rather of improper sex.

See, this is your problem. Not only do you assign yourself the right to tell us what our Torah really means, but you decide that the evidence of absence is absence of evidence. And then, because you haven’t read the source material, you find absences where they don’t exist. And end up making asinine statements with great aplomb. And then doubling down on those asinine statements.

“If a man comes upon a virgin who is not engaged and he seizes her and lies with her, and they are discovered, the man who lay with her shall pay the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife. Because he has violated her, he can never have the right to divorce her.”

He seizes her and he violated her, but obviously, the Torah has no concept of rape.

“But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. But to the young woman you shall do nothing; in the young woman there is no offence punishable by death, for this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbour; because he came upon her in open country, and though the betrothed young woman cried for help there was no one to rescue her.”

He seized her, and she was like a murder victim and cried out for help, but obviously the Torah has no concept of rape.

1 And it came to pass after this, that Absalom the son of David had a fair sister, whose name was Tamar; and Amnon the son of David loved her. 2 And Amnon was so distressed that he fell sick because of his sister Tamar; for she was a virgin; and it seemed hard to Amnon to do any thing unto her. 3 But Amnon had a friend, whose name was Jonadab, the son of Shimeah David’s brother; and Jonadab was a very subtle man. 4 And he said unto him: ‘Why, O son of the king, art thou thus becoming leaner from day to day? wilt thou not tell me?’ And Amnon said unto him: ‘I love Tamar, my brother Absalom’s sister.’ 5 And Jonadab said unto him: ‘Lay thee down on thy bed, and feign thyself sick; and when thy father cometh to see thee, say unto him: Let my sister Tamar come, I pray thee, and give me bread to eat, and dress the food in my sight, that I may see it, and eat it at her hand.’ 6 So Amnon lay down, and feigned himself sick; and when the king was come to see him, Amnon said unto the king: ‘Let my sister Tamar come, I pray thee, and make me a couple of cakes in my sight, that I may eat at her hand.’ 7 Then David sent home to Tamar, saying: ‘Go now to thy brother Amnon’s house, and dress him food.’ 8 So Tamar went to her brother Amnon’s house; and he was lying down. And she took dough, and kneaded it, and made cakes in his sight, and did bake the cakes. 9 And she took the pan, and poured them out before him; but he refused to eat. And Amnon said: ‘Have out all men from me.’ And they went out every man from him. 10 And Amnon said unto Tamar: ‘Bring the food into the chamber, that I may eat of thy hand.’ And Tamar took the cakes which she had made, and brought them into the chamber to Amnon her brother. 11 And when she had brought them near unto him to eat, he took hold of her, and said unto her: ‘Come lie with me, my sister.’ 12 And she answered him: ‘Nay, my brother, do not force me; for no such thing ought to be done in Israel; do not thou this wanton deed. 13 And I, whither shall I carry my shame? and as for thee, thou wilt be as one of the base men in Israel. Now therefore, I pray thee, speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee.’ 14 Howbeit he would not hearken unto her voice; but being stronger than she, he forced her, and lay with her. 15 Then Amnon hated her with exceeding great hatred; for the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her. And Amnon said unto her: ‘Arise, be gone.’ 16 And she said unto him: ‘Not so, because this great wrong in putting me forth is worse than the other that thou didst unto me.’ But he would not hearken unto her.

No, certainly the Torah had no concept of rape, nor knew that it was wrong. Thank you, oh great exegete, you’ve opened my eyes! We’ve been following a path of lies!

>If deceased had children, his widow does not have to marry his brother. Does not follow she is free to marry whom she chooses, does not follow that she belongs to herself.

Of course she is free to marry whom she chooses. There is no prohibition on her doing so.

>That ancient Hebrews did not have a word for rape, nor any law prohibiting rape as such, nor any way of briefly expressing the concept, indicates that women were normatively under the protection and supervision of some male.

You are reading into a text of which you are ignorant, in bad faith.

If you were not pig-ignorant, you would know of, for instance, the Daughters of Zelophehad, who had uncles and cousins and granduncles and so forth. And you would know that rape is prohibited, and that there is a word for it. But you don’t know these things, and when they are brought to your attention, you do the best you can to stick your fingers in your ears and go “lalalala”.

>Steve Johnson says:
…You couldn’t find support for that without and you became mine?

>What’s that if not an expression of property? Even the parallel construction where a woman says a man becomes her husband is different because husband means one who cares for and cultivates his property.

That’s your objection? I recommend you read the part of Proverbs talking about a woman of valor, and then revisit your objection that the husband cares for and cultivates, and not the wife. Also, the Song of Songs-“I am my beloved’s and he is mine.”

Tamac is complaining about incest, about Absolom disregarding the authority of the her father the King, and Abasalom’s refusal to marry her. She may well in reality be complaining about rape, but if she is, she lacks the vocabulary and the modern mental framework to express such a thought coherently and directly, so instead complains about tangential matters.

Hebrew lacked the word for rape, because they lacked the thought, the concept, of a woman owning herself. You suppose that Tamac’s real objection is that she should decide, but her stated objection is not that she should decide, but that her father should decide.

That she should decide is just not in the text. If she thought it, had no words to say it.

You are assuming your conclusion, reinterpreting the text in bad faith in accordance with that conclusion and then claiming that the text supports your assertions.

The word for rape in Biblical and modern Hebrew is oness, which also means “to force.” In a sexual context, the word means “rape.” He forces Tamar, who doesn’t want him, i.e., rapes her. Likewise, the men of Sodom wished to rape Lot’s visitors. The word “abuse” is also used, as in the Concubine of Gibeah who was raped to death.

The difference between rape and seduction is also made clear in parallel passages, one dealing with an unbethrothed virgin who is seduced and another dealing with one who is raped. The latter is compared to a murder victim.

Your idea that a woman was inherently property in Judaism is ludicrous. To support this idea, you have to keep making more and more ludicrous assertions, like that rape was not a woman was not considered a person. You are aided in this by your complete ignorance of the Bible (you can’t even read the passage I quoted you well enough to know that Tamar’s name is Tamar, and keep calling her “Tamac.”) So context like, for instance, G-d making woman as a counterpart to man (which obviously requires personhood) or the daughters of Zelophehad bringing a suit to the Sanhedrin and winning, or Devorah the Prophetess make no impression on you-you simply aren’t aware of them, having skimmed the book briefly and appointed yourself an authority. This combination of complete ignorance and total self-assuredness makes you very tiring to speak with on this subject.

Force means force. In ancient Hebrew does not mean rape. And we know that “force” does not mean rape because Tamar gives a litany of objections, and nowhere in that litany of objections is that the sex act is contrary to her will, or that her brother is using force to accomplish it.

>Force means force. In ancient Hebrew does not mean rape. And we know that “force” does not mean rape because Tamar gives a litany of objections, and nowhere in that litany of objections is that the sex act is contrary to her will, or that her brother is using force to accomplish it.

>There is only one passage dealing with sex with unbetrothed virgins, not two parallel passages. Deuteronomy 22:28-29 No distinction is made between rape and seduction.

Deuteronomy 22:28-29 talks about rape. Exodus 22:15-16 talks about seduction. 15 And if a man entice a virgin that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely pay a dowry for her to be his wife. 16 If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay money according to the dowry of virgins.

For the 20th time: skimming the text and blustering about it may work for the Peppermints of this world, and ESR’s readership, but not for people who take a text seriously. Stick to analyzing World Star Hip Hop videos, you’ll look better doing it.

Tamar says “do not force me; for no such thing ought to be done in Israel: do not thou this folly.
And I, whither shall I cause my shame to go? and as for thee, thou shalt be as one of the fools in Israel. Now therefore, I pray thee, speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee.”

So, nothing wrong with forcing her or taking her contrary to her will, except that he has not received permission from her father to do so.

Deuteronomy 22:28-29 talks about rape. Exodus 22:15-16 talks about seduction. 15 And if a man entice a virgin that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely pay a dowry for her to be his wife. 16 If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay money according to the dowry of virgins.

Deuteronomy 22:28-29 does not talk about rape, making no distinction between rape and seduction, and sets the same penalty (marriage) for both rape and seduction, as Exodus 22:15-16 does for seduction.

Repeating once again the point that you have never answered or attempted to refute: Rape is treated purely as a property crime against the woman’s rightful owner, the penalty for a man who seduces someone else’s woman being identical to that for a man who rapes someone else’s woman and there is no provision for the case that a woman owns herself.

Orthodox Jewish law on women’s rights has changed substantially within my lifetime. It is ludicrous to suggest that it has not changed since the early iron age.

And when gay sex at the Bar Mitzvah becomes optional, and then becomes compulsory, you will still believe Jewish law unchanging.

>>Tamar says “do not force me; for no such thing ought to be done in Israel: do not thou this folly.
And I, whither shall I cause my shame to go? and as for thee, thou shalt be as one of the fools in Israel. Now therefore, I pray thee, speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee.”

>So, nothing wrong with forcing her or taking her contrary to her will, except that he has not received permission from her father to do so.

This is a hideously contorted attempt at exegesis. Forcing her is the very thing that ought not be done in Israel. Her asking him to ask King David for her as a wife is a desperate gambit to avoid being raped. In your twisted interpretation of the Torah, not only should she have nothing to say, since it’s no big deal (at worst, he’ll have to marry her,) but the whole story is nothing special. But it’s one of the most tragic stories in the Torah.

Incidentally, how can she ask him to ask King David to marry them? Isn’t a sister forbidden to a brother I know the answer according to our rabbis, but since you are such a great exegete, I’m sure you’ll enlighten me.

>Deuteronomy 22:28-29 does not talk about rape,

It says “if he seizes her and lies with her”. When you seize a woman and lie with her, that’s rape.

>making no distinction between rape and seduction, and sets the same penalty (marriage) for both rape and seduction,

It is talking about rape. And yes, the Torah makes a very clear distinction between rape and seduction. For instance, just above the above passage, which you haven’t read or thought much about, there’s another passage you haven’t read or thought much about, which talks about what happens when a betrothed maiden is discovered having sex with another man. If she had the opportunity to refuse/resist and didn’t, she is responsible and pays with her life. If she was in a secluded field, and a man “took hold of her and lay with her” (which is, as I told you above, rape,) she is not responsible. She is like a murder victim and blameless, says the Torah, and nothing happens to her, but the man is killed. You may not know the difference between rape and seduction, but the Torah does (and by the way assigns women agency for their sexual behavior.)

>as Exodus 22:15-16 does for seduction.

No. In the case of the unbetrothed rape victim, the Torah says “because he has humbled her,” in the case that they are married, he may never divorce her. The rabbis tell us that this marriage is at her/her family’s discretion. In the case of an unbetrothed virgin who is seduced, there is no restriction on divorce, but the seducer pays a very heavy fee.

>Repeating once again the point that you have never answered or attempted to refute: Rape is treated purely as a property crime against the woman’s rightful owner, the penalty for a man who seduces someone else’s woman being identical to that for a man who rapes someone else’s woman and there is no provision for the case that a woman owns herself.

Your point is stupid. Property is not held responsible for being stolen. A man who seduces or rapes someone else’s wife or a woman engaged to be married is put to death. The woman is put to death if it’s obvious that she was willingly complicit. If not, she is held innocent. We repeatedly see a distinction between rape and seduction, in the description and the outcomes. We see that women owned themselves in the case of, for instance, the daughters of Zelophehad (of which you are, I’m sure, ignorant.)

>Orthodox Jewish law on women’s rights has changed substantially within my lifetime. It is ludicrous to suggest that it has not changed since the early iron age.

Since you’ve demonstrated a complete ignorance of Orthodox Jewish law throughout our conversations, I’m not going to ask for examples of how it’s changed within your lifetime.

>And when gay sex at the Bar Mitzvah becomes optional, and then becomes compulsory, you will still believe Jewish law unchanging.

We are still on for our bet of the bottle of good whiskey about a gay wedding at an Orthodox synagogue before the end of 2016, right?

>Repeating once again the point that you have never answered or attempted to refute: Rape is treated purely as a property crime against the woman’s rightful owner, the penalty for a man who seduces someone else’s woman being identical to that for a man who rapes someone else’s woman and there is no provision for the case that a woman owns herself.

Your point is stupid. Property is not held responsible for being stolen. A man who seduces or rapes someone else’s wife or a woman engaged to be married is put to death. The woman is put to death if it’s obvious that she was willingly complicit. If not, she is held innocent. We repeatedly see a distinction between rape and seduction, in the description and the outcomes.

Your response is evasive, irrelevant and dishonest.

If rape was a crime in Old testament times, the man who rapes would be treated differently from the man who seduces.

If women could own themselves in old testament times, the man who rapes a woman who owns herself would be subject to similar requirements for restitution and punishment as a man who rapes a woman that some other man owns.

B, you’re argument doesn’t make sense. If OT rape was sex without consent then the penalty would be exactly the same for a virgin or a women who was married. Instead we see property restitution in the case of virgin failing to consenting and death for the man for the same act with a married woman. Thus consent doesn’t enter into the crime with anything besides adultery and even with adultery the women is automatically guilty without a really good reason why she didn’t fight back. Saying no or not consenting isn’t enough by Deuteronomical standards.

>If OT rape was sex without consent then the penalty would be exactly the same for a virgin or a women who was married. Instead we see property restitution in the case of virgin failing to consenting and death for the man for the same act with a married woman.

Adultery (meaning, having sex with a woman who is not married to you) is, in the Torah, an abomination, a forbidden sexual act, like having sex with another man or an animal, and carries the death penalty. The man, in this case, is not being punished with death for raping a married woman. He is being punished with death for having sex with her. So, except for the death penalty, he’d be liable for all the same punishments of any physical assault. The death penalty overrides all the others, as it were. Well, it’s the same in secular law-if someone is convicted of petty theft and mass murder, he doesn’t have to do his community service prior to getting the chair.

A man who rapes a virgin or anyone else who would be theoretically permissible to him is not committing a sexual act which is intrinsically forbidden-in another context, it would be fine. If he rapes someone, he is liable for all the punishments involved in any physical assault. On top of that, if he raped a virgin, he not only is liable for all the normal damages, but he took something away from her which was then monetarily quantifiable, i.e., her brideprice, and significantly damaged her chances at future marriage. So he must compensate one or the other, at her discretion (it says at her father’s, but this just means that her father has veto power over the marriage.)

>Thus consent doesn’t enter into the crime with anything besides adultery and even with adultery the women is automatically guilty without a really good reason why she didn’t fight back. Saying no or not consenting isn’t enough by Deuteronomical standards.

You are misunderstanding the thing about whether she was raped in a secluded place or not. It’s not an exhaustive list: that would be ludicrous-what if she was raped in a cellar or some other place in the midst of the city where nobody could hear her? It’s an edge case, to delimit the law. Meaning that when you can reasonably presume the woman’s innocence in this case, you do. She doesn’t need to positively prove she was raped.

Keep in mind that the overall presumption in all capital crimes in the Torah is that the accused are innocent, meaning, there are two witnesses who are both trustworthy according to strict criteria, that they warned the accused that what they were doing was punishable by death and that the accused acknowledged the warning and disregarded it and kept doing what they were doing. And if the court finds the accused guilty, the witnesses have to execute them, and if the witness is found lying, he is executed in place of the one against whom he falsely testified. And here we have a second presumption of innocence, though a weaker one.

Obviously, I misspoke. Adultery of the abominable kind involves having sex with a woman who COULDN’T be married to you, on account of her relation to you or on account of her being married to someone else.

The Torah does not consider a married man having sex outside marriage an adulterer. But it considers this behavior terrible and connects it to another behavior which is an abomination, namely, idolatry; and it says that G-d won’t punish the daughters and daughters-in-law of promiscuous men.

Hosea: I will not punish your daughters when they commit harlotry, nor your daughters-in-law when they commit adultery; for they themselves consort with lewd women, and they sacrifice with harlots; and the people that is without understanding is distraught.

>Compare and contrast with the passage immediately above that does talk about rape. One can, and I rather often have, seize a woman who does not much object to being seized.

The Torah is not talking about 50 shades of gray. Just as the expression is used with Tamar, who begs her brother “do not force me,” and in Deuteronomy 22:28-29, where the man who “finds a damsel that is a virgin, that is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her” is referred to as having “humbled” her (and no such reference is made in the parallel passage about seduction,) and just as in Deuteronomy 22:25-26 the man “takes hold of” the married woman and lies with her, and she is not liable for any penalty because she is the victim of a crime, this expression is used for rape, forcible intercourse against the woman’s will. It’s not ambiguous at all in context.

>If rape was a crime in Old testament times, the man who rapes would be treated differently from the man who seduces.

It is obvious that rape is a crime, because a betrothed maiden who was raped is referred to as blameless and comparable to a murder victim. Murder is a crime in the Torah.

The man who rapes is treated differently from the man who seduces, as I explained above, unless the person he rapes/seduces is someone else’s wife or betrothed, in which case he gets the death penalty. In the case that the woman he rapes or seduces is a virgin, he is not liable for the death penalty, but is treated differently based on whether he raped her or seduced her. If he raped her, he must pay her father a large sum of silver and can never divorce her (if they choose to make him marry her.) If he seduced her, he can marry her but divorce her later.

>If women could own themselves in old testament times, the man who rapes a woman who owns herself would be subject to similar requirements for restitution and punishment as a man who rapes a woman that some other man owns.

He is. If she is her own guardian and he rapes her, if she’s a virgin she gets the 50 shekels of silver on top of all other damages, if not, all the regular damages for physical assault.

>If women could own themselves in old testament times, the man who rapes a woman who owns herself would be subject to similar requirements for restitution and punishment as a man who rapes a woman that some other man owns.

He is. If she is her own guardian and he rapes her, if she’s a virgin she gets the 50 shekels of silver on top of all other damages, if not, all the regular damages for physical assault.

That is directly contrary to the plain and clear wording of the Old Testament

>That is directly contrary to the plain and clear wording of the Old Testament

What is directly contrary? It’s plainly obvious that the case the Torah discusses is, as usual, an edge case, and that the Torah brings it so that we can make inferences, since an exhaustive listing of all the possibilities is neither practical nor necessary. It’s obvious that women were not necessarily under anyone’s guardianship, for instance, the Daughters of Zelophehad, and that such women had legal rights (i.e., the Daughters of Zelophehad had the right of inheritance and sued for it in the Sanhedrin, successfully.) And it’s obvious that raping a virgin brought damages to which she or her legal guardian were entitled, because it says as much. So if she’s not a part of someone’s household, the damages are somehow nullified? That makes no sense.

>“Force” is clear enough. “Seize” is profoundly ambiguous, the more so as compared to the immediately preceding passage that does unambiguously refer to force.

Lots of things are profoundly ambiguous to an ignoramus. The preceding passage gives context.

>If they intended to mean “force”, why is this worded differently to the preceding passage? Different wording, therefore different meaning – intending to cover both cases.

I would suggest that you look up the word used, and then see where else it is used in the Torah, and show me where it is used in a context other than forceful seizure against the will of the owner. You can also compare the various commentaries and see if any of the classical commentators (who spent their life on Hebrew etymology and exegesis from age 5 onwards) shared this interpretation of yours (50 shades of gray.)

>“Force” is clear enough. “Seize” is profoundly ambiguous, the more so as compared to the immediately preceding passage that does unambiguously refer to force.

Lots of things are profoundly ambiguous to an ignoramus. The preceding passage gives context.

And the context provided by the preceding passage is that the preceding passage deals with forcing a woman against her will, and thus the subsequent passage does not.

One may lay hold of a fruit that rightly belongs to someone else, but the fruit has no objection. One may force a sheep that rightly belongs to oneself. Change in wording implies a corresponding change in meaning.

Deuteronomy 22
25 But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die:

28 If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;

29 Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.

One says “force”, one says “lay hold” Different words, therefore different meanings. I with great regularity have laid hold of women. “Laying hold” does not specify whether she was keen on being laid hold of or not. “force” does specify. 28 covers both rape and seduction, and makes no distinction between them.

>And the context provided by the preceding passage is that the preceding passage deals with forcing a woman against her will, and thus the subsequent passage does not.
…
>One says “force”, one says “lay hold” Different words, therefore different meanings. I with great regularity have laid hold of women. “Laying hold” does not specify whether she was keen on being laid hold of or not. “force” does specify. 28 covers both rape and seduction, and makes no distinction between them.

Having denied that the idea of rape existed at all in the Torah, you now find yourself explaining to me that this passage of the Torah means rape in one of its parts and doesn’t mean rape in another 🙂

The distinction between the two parts is only that in one case, the girl is betrothed, and thus sex with her brings the death penalty, whereas in the other she is unbetrothed.

I love how you presume to lecture me on the etymology of a language which you can’t even read. You could at least ask what the etymology of the word is, how else it’s used, what contexts, etc.

The root of the word used here is תפשׂ, tav-phe-sin. It’s possibly the same root as for the English word “thief”-http://www.edenics.net/english-word-origins.aspx?word=THIEF

It’s still used in Hebrew, for instance, when you catch a criminal or a terrorist.

In Proverbs, it’s used to mean “to steal”-Two things have I asked of Thee; deny me them not before I die: Remove far from me falsehood and lies; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with mine allotted bread; Lest I be full, and deny, and say: ‘Who is the LORD?’ Or lest I be poor, and steal, and profane the name of my God.

It’s also used to describe the capture of fortresses, etc. Well, anyway, read the links yourself. Nowhere is it used in the context of sex with a consenting person. It’s always got a connotation of violence when used towards a person, always of the person being seized against his will.

So when the man in question seizes the girl and has sex with her, and he humbles her, and thus is punished, the seizure is by force, against her will. And indeed it would make no sense to tell him that he can’t divorce her because he has humbled her if it was by her own will.

One says “force”, one says “lay hold” Different words, therefore different meanings. I with great regularity have laid hold of women. “Laying hold” does not specify whether she was keen on being laid hold of or not. “force” does specify. 28 covers both rape and seduction, and makes no distinction between them.

Having denied that the idea of rape existed at all in the Torah, you now find yourself explaining to me that this passage of the Torah means rape in one of its parts and doesn’t mean rape in another 🙂

When is the earliest Jewish writing that unambiguously interprets Deuteronomy 22:28 as referring to what we today call rape?

As a general rule, when you give me a Talmudic source, its plain and clear meaning is directly different from that which you attribute to it, so please be so kind as to give me a source as well as a date.

I suspect that you are going to run into the same problems you found with supporting the ban on taking babies for a stroll on the sabbath.

I presume you will explain that the Sages of the Talmud were progressives since they didn’t share your deep insights into the intent of the Torah.

>I suspect that you are going to run into the same problems you found with supporting the ban on taking babies for a stroll on the sabbath.

Well, I am running into the same kinds of problems, namely, you assuming your conclusion and moving the null hypothesis.

>If he seduces the girl, he is violating her owner’s property rights, stealing.

The girl doesn’t have an owner. She’s not a slave. Furthermore, theft is repaid fivefold according to Torah law, and he’s not liable fivefold the brideprice for seduction. Furthermore, the Mishna (linked above) explains that someone who violates a virgin is liable in a way that someone who seduces her is not: MISHNAH. IF AN ORPHAN WAS BETROTHED AND THEN DIVORCED, ANY MAN WHO VIOLATES HER, SAID R. ELEAZAR, IS LIABLE [TO PAY THE STATUTORY FINE]11 BUT THE MAN WHO SEDUCES HER IS EXEMPT.

>Which is the etymology I already implied when I suggested laying hold of someone else’s fruit. The fruit does not mind.

You don’t have an “etymology.” You have “a bunch of made up bullshit about a language you don’t read.” How arrogant can you be?

I presume you will explain that the writer is a progressive and doesn’t know what the Talmud says,

This depicts the Talmud standing the old testament on its head, and then the Rabbis proceeding to stand the Talmud on its head. And then Rabbis, under attack for not going far enough, standing on their own heads. It is a chronicle of of Jewish law being read upside down and backwards to accommodate the further changing times, and then that reading itself being twisted beyond recognition to accommodate still changing times, and then the new reading coming in for another re-re-re-reintepretation.

MISHNAH. THE SEDUCER PAYS THREE FORMS [OF COMPENSATION] AND THE VIOLATOR FOUR. THE SEDUCER PAYS COMPENSATION FOR INDIGNITY AND BLEMISH41 AND THE [STATUTORY] FINE, WHILE THE VIOLATOR PAYS AN ADDITIONAL [FORM OF COMPENSATION] IN THAT HE PAYS FOR THE PAIN.
WHAT [IS THE DIFFERENCE] BETWEEN [THE PENALTIES OF] A SEDUCER AND THOSE OF A VIOLATOR? THE VIOLATOR PAYS COMPENSATION FOR THE PAIN BUT THE SEDUCER DOES NOT PAY COMPENSATION FOR THE PAIN. THE VIOLATOR PAYS42 FORTHWITH43 BUT THE SEDUCER [PAYS ONLY] IF HE DISMISSES44 HER. THE VIOLATOR MUST DRINK OUT OF HIS POT45 BUT THE SEDUCER MAY DISMISS [THE GIRL] IF HE WISHES. WHAT IS MEANT BY46 ‘MUST DRINK OUT OF HIS POT’? EVEN IF SHE IS LAME, EVEN IF SHE IS BLIND AND EVEN IF SHE IS AFFLICTED WITH BOILS [HE MAY NOT DISMISS HER]. IF, HOWEVER, SHE WAS FOUND TO HAVE COMMITTED47 AN IMMORAL ACT OR WAS UNFIT TO MARRY AN ISRAELITE48 HE MAY NOT CONTINUE TO LIVE WITH HER, FOR IT IS SAID IN SCRIPTURE, AND UNTO HIM SHE SHALL BE FOR A WIFE,49 [IMPLYING] A WIFE THAT IS FIT ‘UNTO HIM.

That may well supersede Deuteronomy 22, but does not offer an alternative interpretation of Deuteronomy 22:28

It also addresses the issue of marriage by having sex. If the seducer does not dismiss her, then they are married. No need for the big party, priestly rituals, or even the handshake by the patriarch, etc.

By which standard, the behavior of Ruth becomes entirely intelligible. Obviously she is trying to seduce Boaz, or get Boaz to seduce her, and such behavior is, assuming whathisname does not exist, or can be ignored by the more powerful Boaz, entirely chaste.

>That may well supersede Deuteronomy 22, but does not offer an alternative interpretation of Deuteronomy 22:28

You can’t read. It tells you what the relevant passage means, what the difference between a girl who was raped and one who was seduced is, what the difference in the penalties is and why. What else do you want?

And again, the null hypothesis is that the Sages, who spent their lives learning the Torah from people who got it in an unbroken chain, knew what the Torah said and what it meant. It’s YOUR interpretation that is the alternative one.

>It also addresses the issue of marriage by having sex. If the seducer does not dismiss her, then they are married. No need for the big party, priestly rituals, or even the handshake by the patriarch, etc.

The discussion of how, specifically, people marry, is elsewhere in the Talmud. Specifically, Tractate Kiddushin (http://halakhah.com/pdf/nashim/Kiddushin.pdf). Here, the Sages presume the reader knows it. They are not saying that this is how a marriage is performed. Just the same way as, when they say that a man who rapes a married woman is executed, they don’t have to explain how he is tried, how he is found guilty, how he is executed, who executes him, etc.

>By which standard, the behavior of Ruth becomes entirely intelligible. Obviously she is trying to seduce Boaz, or get Boaz to seduce her, and such behavior is, assuming whathisname does not exist, or can be ignored by the more powerful Boaz, entirely chaste.

For the billionth time. People do not marry by furtive copulation, and never did. You keep trying to stretch the plain meanings of words. This is a system which does not exist, has never existed anywhere, and couldn’t exist.

The Mishna states that intercourse is one of the three ways by which a marriage is sealed, the others being by deed of marriage or transfer of an article of value. However, this means that there is first a betrothal, called Erusin, which requires two kosher witnesses. This is all discussed at length in the Talmud.

The relevant passages already tell me what they mean. The authors of the Talmud do not attempt explain the gap between their meaning and all the relevant passages in Genesis and Deuteronomy that they supersede.

This is not a commentary, explanation, or interpretation, of the relevant sections of the Old Testament, or any one section of it, It is a wholesale replacement of all of them, failing to address any one of them.

>This depicts the Talmud standing the old testament on its head, and then the Rabbis proceeding to stand the Talmud on its head. And then Rabbis, under attack for not going far enough, standing on their own heads. It is a chronicle of of Jewish law being read upside down and backwards to accommodate the further changing times, and then that reading itself being twisted beyond recognition to accommodate still changing times, and then the new reading coming in for another re-re-re-reintepretation.

Well, either the Rabbis (who are the ones who wrote the Talmud and the Mishna down) are all confused and dishonest and don’t know what they’re talking about and what the Torah is talking about and reinterpret it in bad faith to suit a political agenda, or you have a particularly bad case of projection. I’ve got a pretty good idea that it’s the latter.

Well, either the Rabbis (who are the ones who wrote the Talmud and the Mishna down) are all confused and dishonest and don’t know what they’re talking about and what the Torah is talking about and reinterpret it in bad faith to suit a political agenda, or you have a particularly bad case of projection. I’ve got a pretty good idea that it’s the latter.

When the writer makes his sarcastic observation about twelve years, and twelve years and six months, you don’t find anything the least bit funny?

You think he is being completely serious, and that it is perfectly natural and reasonable to be completely serious on this?

>When the writer makes his sarcastic observation about twelve years, and twelve years and six months, you don’t find anything the least bit funny?

>You think he is being completely serious, and that it is perfectly natural and reasonable to be completely serious on this?

I think there’s something wrong with you.

Yes, I think it’s natural and reasonable that there’s an age of maturity, and that above this set and somewhat arbitrary limit, one set of rules apply, and below it, another set of rules. No, I don’t think that he’s being funny. No, I don’t think that it’s ridiculous that at 16 years of age + 1 day you can apply for a driver’s license and that a day ago you couldn’t. What’s the problem?

>The relevant passages already tell me what they mean. The authors of the Talmud do not attempt explain the gap between their meaning and all the relevant passages in Genesis and Deuteronomy that they supersede.

Really? Did you suddenly become fluent in Biblical Hebrew? Or do you mean that the translator of your preferred version is so trustworthy that you can rely on your understanding of his translation completely?

Is there any other code of law where its application is so obvious from its most concise form that any asshole can just show up and know exactly what it means? Any functioning civilizations built on this principle that you know of?

I am sure that if you were around at the giving of the 10 commandments, you’d accuse Moses of being a progressive holier than thou entryist. After all, G-d just tells him to have the people sanctify themselves, and Moses tells them not to come near a woman. What gives?

Exodus 19:
10 And the LORD said unto Moses: ‘Go unto the people, and sanctify them to-day and to-morrow, and let them wash their garments, 11 and be ready against the third day; for the third day the LORD will come down in the sight of all the people upon mount Sinai. 12 And thou shalt set bounds unto the people round about, saying: Take heed to yourselves, that ye go not up into the mount, or touch the border of it; whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death; 13 no hand shall touch him, but he shall surely be stoned, or shot through; whether it be beast or man, it shall not live; when the ram’s horn soundeth long, they shall come up to the mount.’ 14 And Moses went down from the mount unto the people, and sanctified the people; and they washed their garments. 15 And he said unto the people: ‘Be ready against the third day; come not near a woman.’

Is there any other code of law where its application is so obvious from its most concise form that any asshole can just show up and know exactly what it means? Any functioning civilizations built on this principle that you know of?

I can tell when people are interpreting the law, perhaps proposing interpretations to which not all people would agree, and when people are just making shit up off the top of their heads.

The section of the talmud in question is not a discussion of what the original biblical law might mean in application. It new law blowing off the old law.

>I can tell when people are interpreting the law, perhaps proposing interpretations to which not all people would agree, and when people are just making shit up off the top of their heads.

Is Moses just making shit up off the top of his head?

>The section of the talmud in question is not a discussion of what the original biblical law might mean in application. It new law blowing off the old law.

It is exactly a discussion of what the law means in application. And this is in accordance with the words of the Torah and Moses himself at the end of his life: 11 For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not too hard for thee, neither is it far off. 12 It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say: ‘Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it?’ 13 Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say: ‘Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it?’ 14 But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.

Meaning that we have a living oral tradition of the law among us, and always will. Not only do we read the Written Torah (and we read it constantly, in weekly portions on a yearly cycle, so we all know what it says,) but we have the Oral Torah, which is the living implementation.

Allegedly he got it directly from God. Since I doubt the existence of God, or at least a God that cares about humans, yes, making it up. But he was not claiming to be the continuation of an ancient tradition, he was openly formalizing it and bringing it up to the times. Orthodox Jews claim to be the bearers of an ancient tradition that, by an amazing coincidence, differs from progressivism by only a few decades, and which recently eradicated those branches of Judaism that differed from progressivism by substantially more than a few decades.

On the internal evidence, looks like Moses formalized a religion in which god were family gods, and patriarchs were rulers and high priests, to a religion with, as in Egypt, priests and a universal God.

The Hebrews were heirs to a pro survival religious tradition – no infanticide, stay clean, bury your poop, and strict patriarchy. This caused their rapid population growth from the sons of Israel to the time of Exodus. Welding these disparate quarrelsom clans into a nation, Moses made up a state religion, or state like religion, based on this tradition, with a universal God and official priests, in place of family gods and the patriarch as priest.

The patriarchal aspect of the religion has from time to time come under attack from states, who want to replace the authority of the patriarch with the state bureaucracy.

Some branches failed to bend, and were crushed. Some bent, and survived because of their cleanliness beliefs. Jewish cleanliness beliefs, however, no longer give them an advantage, because these days pretty much every religion has assimilated, or is in the process of assimilating, science based cleanliness beliefs.

By the way, your interpretation, that Rabbinical Judaism is just a bunch of stuff made up that has nothing to do with the Torah, which anyone can pick up and read and interpret for himself in accordance with the plain text, is not new.

It was shared by the Sadducees, the Karaites and the Samaritans.

The first are extinct and the latter two groups almost extinct.

Now, the Torah itself tells us, “by this shall you live,” meaning that if following something that claims to be Torah, Jews die out, it was not the Torah.

So I can tell you that not only do I find the rabbis’ arguments convincing, I see that the results of following those arguments are coherent with the Written Torah, and that the result of following YOUR arguments is national extinction.

Whether or not I am competent to interpret the Torah, I am competent to tell if people are making up brand new shit under pressure from circumstances with only the most superficial pretense of basing it on the Torah.

And, on rape related topics, female autonomy, and female self owership, not only did the Talmud make up brand new shit, but this shit was radically reinterpreted at least twice more, resulting in current doctrine that lags the ever leftwards march of progressivism by only a little bit more than Christian religions do.

>Allegedly he got it directly from God. Since I doubt the existence of God, or at least a God that cares about humans, yes, making it up. But he was not claiming to be the continuation of an ancient tradition, he was openly formalizing it and bringing it up to the times.

The point went right by your head. G-d tells Moses, “tell the people to do X.” Moses tells the people, “do Y.” Is Moses making stuff up on his own?

>Orthodox Jews claim to be the bearers of an ancient tradition that, by an amazing coincidence, differs from progressivism by only a few decades, and which recently eradicated those branches of Judaism that differed from progressivism by substantially more than a few decades.

Gibberish. You asserted this nonsense from the beginning. When asked for an example, you claimed female consent to marriage didn’t exist in Judaism until recently (using Fiddler on the Roof as your primary source, no less,) and that the Sepharadi Jews didn’t require any consent. When I pointed out that in the Mishna, codified in the 2nd century CE, requires female consent for marriage, you then claimed that the concept of rape didn’t exist until quite recently. Now that I point out that in the Torah, the law on rape differs explicitly from the law on seduction, and that the Mishna explicitly restates this, you go right back to your original assertion.

>On the internal evidence, looks like Moses formalized a religion in which god were family gods, and patriarchs were rulers and high priests, to a religion with, as in Egypt, priests and a universal God.

Brilliant. The G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was not universal? Which family gods did they worship? The discoveries just keep coming with you.

>The Hebrews were heirs to a pro survival religious tradition – no infanticide, stay clean, bury your poop, and strict patriarchy. This caused their rapid population growth from the sons of Israel to the time of Exodus.

That’s amazing. Where do you find, since you are a sola scriptura guy, commandments against infanticide and for cleanliness, feces burial and patriarchy PRIOR to the Exodus? I’ll make it easy on you-there are none.

>Some branches failed to bend, and were crushed.

Oh? Which branches, exactly?

>Some bent, and survived because of their cleanliness beliefs. Jewish cleanliness beliefs, however, no longer give them an advantage, because these days pretty much every religion has assimilated, or is in the process of assimilating, science based cleanliness beliefs.

Your reductionism is just another example of “once a commie, always a commie.” Marx explained everything through Homo Economicus. In your world, everything comes down to cleanliness and patriarchy. Well, the Jewish ghettos of Europe were not known for cleanliness-they had open sewers, etc.

>Whether or not I am competent to interpret the Torah, I am competent to tell if people are making up brand new shit under pressure from circumstances with only the most superficial pretense of basing it on the Torah.

I don’t think you are. What circumstances were pressuring the rabbis of Babylon and Israel who were codifying the Talmud to differentiate between a rape victim and someone seduced? And why does this distinction also exist in the Torah?

>And, on rape related topics, female autonomy, and female self owership, not only did the Talmud make up brand new shit, but this shit was radically reinterpreted at least twice more, resulting in current doctrine that lags the ever leftwards march of progressivism by only a little bit more than Christian religions do.

The Talmud made nothing up. It codified an existing tradition. On occasion, the rabbis institute a fence, which they explicitly state is a rabbinical institution and not from the Torah, such as their requirement that marriage, which can be legally sealed by “deed, money or intercourse” is to be sealed by all three. And when we look at legal documents from almost a millennium before the Talmud, we see that, by and large, the Jews did things the way the rabbis say the Torah intends for them to be done. For instance, the marriage contracts of Elephantine (the marriage contract is not explicitly described in the Written Torah,) and the tefillin of Qumran (the tefillin are also not explicitly described in the Written Torah, which is why the Karaites and Samaritans don’t have them.)

The point went right by your head. G-d tells Moses, “tell the people to do X.” Moses tells the people, “do Y.” Is Moses making stuff up on his own?

Moses was overtly instituting a new religion and a new social order, based on existing beliefs, customs, and traditions, but explicitly and overtly new.

>On the internal evidence, looks like Moses formalized a religion in which god were family gods, and patriarchs were rulers and high priests, to a religion with, as in Egypt, priests and a universal God.

Brilliant. The G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was not universal? Which family gods did they worship? The discoveries just keep coming with you.

Genesis 31:31-43 The God of Jacob is a family god, much like the other family gods that Rachel is sitting on. Not obviously universal until Moses, and maybe not obviously universal until some time after Moses. It would seem that at the time of Jacob, gods outnumbered people.

As each patriarch was his own independent state, each patriarch had his own religion and his own god or gods, and was high priest of that religion.

And when we look at legal documents from almost a millennium before the Talmud, we see that, by and large, the Jews did things the way the rabbis say the Torah intends for them to be done.

Indeed we do. Definitely the Torah way of doing things, but not, however, the what the rabbis say the Torah really means. Even though these women are eventually freed, it is clearly normative that they are chattel property, can be seized for debt, etc, and they do not get freed until past their fertile age.

>>Whether or not I am competent to interpret the Torah, I am competent to tell if people are making up brand new shit under pressure from circumstances with only the most superficial pretense of basing it on the Torah.

Tell me, when in the Mishna it says, for instance, IF A WOMAN AUTHORIZES HER AGENT TO
GIVE HER IN BETROTHAL, AND SHE GOES AND BETROTHS HERSELF [TO ANOTHER]:
IF HER OWN PRECEDED, HER BETROTHAL IS VALID; IF HER AGENT’S PRECEDED, HIS
BETROTHAL IS VALID. AND IF THEY DO NOT KNOW, BOTH MUST GIVE HER A
DIVORCE; BUT IF THEY WISH, ONE GIVES A DIVORCE AND THE OTHER MARRIES HER.
GEMARA.

Now, the Mishna takes it for granted that a woman can give herself in betrothal, or deputize an agent to do so for her, and doesn’t see it as worth remarking on, only pointing out what to do in a potential situation of confusion between her and such an agent. And none of the rabbis who comment on this Mishna even see the basic premise that a woman can do this as worthy of commentary.

Again, to me this is obviously the way things always have been. But you have to propose a scenario where, what, the feminist lobby of 2nd century CE put such pressure on the rabbis that they just stand the Torah on its head, and none of them records a dissenting opinion? Even though they have dissenting opinions about all kinds of things, like whether the Romans are pure evil or good for Israel, etc.? And the reason you know this is that the Torah doesn’t say anything about whether a woman can or can’t betroth herself? I’m guessing you’d say betrothal didn’t exist in the Torah times at all and that people got married by running off in the desert and having sex with each other and then if the man retroactively decided that this made them married, they were then married, correct?

Again, you did not respond to that little joke about twelve years, and twelve years and six months.

That the Talmudic position is no longer in effect casts doubt on the claim it had been in effect for very long before the Talmud was written.

Not only is the Talmudic position not the way things were before. It is also not the way things are now. No matter what date you choose as representing eternal and unchanging Jewish practice, it on the one hand has some elements that are horrifying by present day progressive standards, and on the other hand is obviously a radical change from the way things were very not long before.

>Again, you did not respond to that little joke about twelve years, and twelve years and six months.

I told you-it’s not a joke. There’s a legal status that depends on exact age. What is the problem?

>That the Talmudic position is no longer in effect casts doubt on the claim it had been in effect for very long before the Talmud was written.

What Talmudic position is no longer in effect?

>Not only is the Talmudic position not the way things were before. It is also not the way things are now. No matter what date you choose as representing eternal and unchanging Jewish practice, it on the one hand has some elements that are horrifying by present day progressive standards, and on the other hand is obviously a radical change from the way things were very not long before.

Please explain to me which aspect of Jewish marriage as seen today is “obviously a radical change from the way things were not very long before.” With sources for the way things were before, please.

>Again, you did not respond to that little joke about twelve years, and twelve years and six months.

I told you-it’s not a joke. There’s a legal status that depends on exact age. What is the problem?

That rabbis were transparently and ludicrously weaseling out of a legal status for women that was at the time that those portions of the Talmud were written normal and normative for all or most women, by restricting that status to six months, and are today reweaseling out of that earlier weaseling.

>Moses was overtly instituting a new religion and a new social order, based on existing beliefs, customs, and traditions, but explicitly and overtly new.

Again, you are not understanding the question. When the Torah says “G-d told Moses X, then Moses told the people Y”, does this mean that it intends for us to understand that Moses just made up the difference between X and Y on his own?

>Genesis 31:31-43 The God of Jacob is a family god, much like the other family gods that Rachel is sitting on. Not obviously universal until Moses, and maybe not obviously universal until some time after Moses. It would seem that at the time of Jacob, gods outnumbered people.

No, that’s incorrect. The G-d of Jacob is a universal one. The same as the G-d of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham refers to G-d as the “everlasting,” which means universal. Abraham’s G-d deals with the fates of all the nations. Abraham’s G-d identifies Himself as the “almighty,” which again means universal. You never see Abraham, Isaac or Jacob making idols or acknowledging the existence of other gods, which they would if their god was not universal (as we see the idolaters around them acknowledge G-d). They go out of their way to give credit to G-d for everything that happens to them.

As for Genesis 31, what is the problem? Lavan is an idolater. He has terafim (which are some sort of idols) which his daughter steals. Why she steals them is a matter of debate-some of the commentators say that she stole them to prevent her father from committing any more idolatry, and certainly the disrespectful way in which she treats them suggests that she did not herself believe they were holy or had any power. If I steal the local Indian restaurant’s Ganesha statue and use it as a shoestand, it’s pretty obvious that I don’t believe Ganesha exists or has any power over me. In any case, Jacob certainly does not believe that they have any power.

>As each patriarch was his own independent state, each patriarch had his own religion and his own god or gods, and was high priest of that religion.

Not in my copy of the Torah. First, no patriarch was an independent state. We see Abraham’s dealings with the king of Sodom and the inhabitants of Hevron, and it is obvious that he was living on their land, as is obvious from Isaac’s dealings with Avimelech. Second, we see that Abraham’s god is NOT the god of his father, Nahor, but on the other hand, Lot’s god is G-d Almighty, meaning, the same as Abraham’s. Now, Lot is the head of his own household, so why would he adapt his uncle’s god? Third, we never see Abraham referred to as a priest. We see Melchizedek referred to as a priest of El Elyon, meaning, the Highest God. And we see that Abraham accepts Melchizedek’s blessings and tithes.

>And when we look at legal documents from almost a millennium before the Talmud, we see that, by and large, the Jews did things the way the rabbis say the Torah intends for them to be done.

>Indeed we do. Definitely the Torah way of doing things, but not, however, the what the rabbis say the Torah really means. Even though these women are eventually freed, it is clearly normative that they are chattel property, can be seized for debt, etc, and they do not get freed until past their fertile age.

What women are you talking about, and where do you see that this is normative? Also, where do you see women being seized for debt and not being freed until past their fertile age?

Moses told the people Y”, does this mean that it intends for us to understand that Moses just made up the difference between X and Y on his own?

Moses is depicted as a leader of men, not a telephone. Of course the character depicted by the chronicler made up the difference on his own.

Definitely the Torah way of doing things, but not, however, the what the rabbis say the Torah really means. Even though these women are eventually freed, it is clearly normal and normative that they are chattel property, can be seized for debt, etc, and they do not get freed until past their fertile age.

What women are you talking about, and where do you see that this is normative? Also, where do you see women being seized for debt and not being freed until past their fertile age?

I gave you the link. Here it is again. Very old testament. The marriage contract is not with the woman, but with her owner. In another document, we see someone’s daughter become self owned in that on his death, he makes provision that she cannot be seized for debt or sold to the highest bidder – implying that while he lives he has chattel ownership of her.

You say the elphantine papyri show that women were not slaves. These women were chattel slaves throughout their fertile years. Where are the papyri that show women were not slaves?

>That rabbis were transparently and ludicrously weaseling out of a legal status for women that was at the time that those portions of the Talmud were written normal and normative for all or most women, by restricting that status to six months, and are today reweaseling out of that earlier weaseling.

How do you know that at the time the Talmud was written, this legal status was normative for all women? The Talmud is speaking of a situation where a man sells his daughter, who is a minor, to someone for the purpose of marriage. The word used in the Torah is “naara,” which means “female youth.”

>Moses is depicted as a leader of men, not a telephone. Of course the character depicted by the chronicler made up the difference on his own.

Well, in that case, he has the right to interpret what G-d is telling him in general into particular instructions for implementation. And he also has the right to deputize others to do so, as long as they have the learning and discernment to do so, which is exactly what happens. And, naturally, once you have this situation and he passes on, you have a situation where you have an original, received corpus of law, a set of rules for practically applying that corps to real life questions, and a corpus of men qualified to do so. Either that, or you need to rely on prophecy for practical advice. But in the last book of the Torah, Moses says to the Jews, you’ve gotten all of the Torah, you can’t say “it’s in the heavens, someone needs to get it for us,” which indicates that its the former situation. Which is what we have.

>I gave you the link. Here it is again. Very old testament. The marriage contract is not with the woman, but with her owner. In another document, we see someone’s daughter become self owned in that on his death, he makes provision that she cannot be seized for debt or sold to the highest bidder – implying that while he lives he has chattel ownership of her.

Eh, I thought the Elephantine Papyri were untrustworthy, since there were Persians in the area and thus it was unpossible that the Jews were living by their Torah? Anyway, which case are you speaking of? Is it Tapmut, who is the slave of Meshullam the Jew? She is not Jewish, and she is not his wife. She is a slave, as is her daughter. So we are not talking about marriage, we are talking about slavery. Or are you speaking of Yehoyishma, the sister of Zakkur? It is unclear to me that they are Jewish and that this is the same Zakkur, since Zakkur and Ananiah are here identified as Arameans, although the Jewish witness names indicate that the couple are Jewish. In any case, this contract specifies divorce upon the wife’s demand if she so wishes, although she is then not entitled to her dowry. This is exactly what the Talmud, codified 600 years later, says.

>You say the elphantine papyri show that women were not slaves. These women were chattel slaves throughout their fertile years. Where are the papyri that show women were not slaves?

You can’t read your own sources. The first contract talks about a woman who is a non-Jewish slave, and talks about her manumission and that of her daughter. The second is the marriage contract of a free Jewish woman. You yourself are quoting a source that demonstrates the difference between a non-Jewish bondwoman and a Jewish wife!

How do you know that at the time the Talmud was written, this legal status was normative for all women? The Talmud is speaking of a situation where a man sells his daughter, who is a minor, to someone for the purpose of marriage

Bullshit.

The Talmud is speaking of almost all marriages, all normal and normative marriages, in that the Talmud, like the Old Testament, treats bride price paid to the father of the bride as normal and normative, as customary, expected, usual, and proper, and subsequent rabbis weasel out of this, making it abnormal and non normative.

The first contract talks about a woman who is a non-Jewish slave, and talks about her manumission and that of her daughter. The second is the marriage contract of a free Jewish woman. You yourself are quoting a source that demonstrates the difference between a non-Jewish bondwoman and a Jewish wife!

And the second contract, like the first, is not between husband and bride, but between husband and owner of the bride. The supposedly free Jewish woman is by our standards as much a slave and chattel as the first. If divorced, by her husband she becomes self owned, if widowed and faithful to her dead husband, becomes self owned.

But if she should misbehave, or divorce her husband, she does not become self owned, but returns to her original owner.

Well, in that case, he has the right to interpret what G-d is telling him in general into particular instructions for implementation. And he also has the right to deputize others to do so, as long as they have the learning and discernment to do so, which is exactly what happens.

You are arguing both that the rabbis have not performed triple somersaults on doctrine, and that they have the right to do so. Which is it?

>The Talmud is speaking of almost all marriages, all normal and normative marriages, in that the Talmud, like the Old Testament, treats bride price paid to the father of the bride as normal and normative, as customary, expected, usual, and proper, and subsequent rabbis weasel out of this, making it abnormal and non normative.

Who weaseled out of what? If the rabbis moved most of the money from the brideprice to the ketubah, which is the brideprice deferred to the end of the marriage to make it easier for young men with no means to marry, and to disincentivize divorce-that is their prerogative. “Originally it was the practice to actually give a virgin two hundred and a widow one hundred; so the men would grow old and not take wives, … until Simeon ben Shetah came and amended the legislation, providing that the groom promise her in writing, “all my property is a guarantee for her ketubbah.””

In the Elephantine Papyrus you quoted, we already see that bride price was largely symbolic, in that the money that Ananiah pays Zakkur for his sister’s hand is very little compared to the money his sister brings to the household: I have paid to you as the bride price of your sister[6] Yehoyishma’ (5) I karsh of silver; you have received it [and have been satisfied therewi]th. Your sister Yehoyishma’ has brought into my house a cash sum (6a) of two karsh, (two) 2 shekels, and 5 hallurs of silver, . . . (Lines 6b-13a, defective, a list of probably I2 articles of wool and linen with their respective values; 13b-15a, 5 articles of copper with their respective values; 15b missing.) (15c) [Garments and articles of co]pper with the cash and the bride price:[7] seven (that is, 7) karsh, eight (that is, 8) shekels, and 5 hallurs of silver by the king’s (17a) weights, silver of 2 R[8] to the ten. (17b-21aa, containers of palm leaves, reeds, wood, and stone and quantities of various sorts of oil—no values specified.[9])

Further, bride price is not like the purchase of a slave but more like compensation to the household from which she comes for the expense involved in raising her and caring for her. Hence the brideprice was fixed, and did not vary between beautiful women and ugly ones, young and old, skilled and unskilled, as it would for a slave.

>And the second contract, like the first, is not between husband and bride, but between husband and owner of the bride.

He is not her owner. He is her guardian and is thus negotiating on her behalf. As usual, you are bringing sources which you can’t be bothered to read. Thus, he receives a small sum for her brideprice, 1 karsh, and she brings a large amount of money and property into the marriage. Do you, when you sell a car for $5000, throw in half a bar of gold to sweeten the deal?

>The supposedly free Jewish woman is by our standards as much a slave and chattel as the first. If divorced, by her husband she becomes self owned, if widowed and faithful to her dead husband, becomes self owned. But if she should misbehave, or divorce her husband, she does not become self owned, but returns to her original owner.

As usual, your reading comprehension sucks. If she divorces him, she “returns to her father’s house.” Well, her adoptive father, Meshullam, is not her guardian, which we can judge by the fact that Zakkur, her brother, is the one making the deal. Meshullam is presumably dead at this point. So “her father’s house” is a figure of speech. What does it mean? Well, we can look at a parallel contract, the wedding contract of Miphtaya:

On…[date]…of the King, said As-hor the son of Teos, builder to the king, to Mahseia, an Aramaean of Seyne belonging to the quarter of Warizath, saying: I came to thy house that thou give me thy daughter Miphtahya to wife. She is my wife and I am her husband from this day and forever. I have given thee as a marriage settlement for they daughter Miphtahya the sum of five shekels royal standard; it is accepted by thee and thy heart is content therewith. I have delivered unto the hand of thy daughter Miphtahya as money for an outfit 1 karash 2 shekels…1 woolen robe, new, striped, dyed on both sides…There is accepted by me and my heart is content therewith 1 couch of reeds with 4 supports of stone…1 cosmetic box of ivory, new. If tomorrow or any other day, As-hor shall die having no issue whether male or female by Miphtahya his wife, Miphtahya shall have full right over the house of As-hor and his goods and chattels and all that he has on the face of the earth without exception. If tomorrow or any other day, Miphtahya shall stand up in the congregation and say: I divorce As-hor my husband, the price of divorce shall be on her head; she shall return to the scales and she shall weigh for As-hor the sum of five shekels (6?) and two d., and all which I have delivered unto her she shall give back, both string and thread, in one day at one time, and she shall go away withersoever she will and no suit or process shall ensue. And if he shall rise up against Miphtahya to drive her away from the house of As-hor and his goods and his chattels, he shall pay the sum of 20 kebhes and this deed shall be annulled, and I shall have not power to say: I have another wife than Miphtahya and other children than the children which Miphtahya shall bear to me. If I shall say I have children and a wife other than Miphtahya and her children, I shall pay to Miphtahya the sum of 20 kebhes royal standard, and I shall have no power to take away my goods and my chattels from Miphtahya. And if I shall have removed them from her…[erasure]…I will pay Miphtahya the sum of 20 kebhes royal standard. Nathan the son of Ananiah has written this deed at the dictation of As-hor, and the witnesses thereto are Penuliah the son of Jezaniah, Jezaniah the son of Uriah, Menaichem the son of Saccur: Witnesses.”

So, here we see that when the woman stands up and says, I divorce my husband, she doesn’t get the ketubah but goes wherever she will. We also see a delayed payment of the ketubah until a divorce which is initiated by the husband, just as it is today. Perhaps the difference is that Yehoyishma, the daughter of a gentile slave, who was manumitted in 427 BCE by Meshullam, her father, had been manumitted on the condition that she provide for Meshullam and his son Zakkur until the death of the latter. So Zakkur, in making this marriage, is releasing Yehoyishma from this obligation to him, on the condition that she does not divorce Ananiah. This is a highly specific case. But from it, we can learn that even an emancipated former Gentile bondwoman is not a slave. How much more so a Jewish woman!

>You are arguing both that the rabbis have not performed triple somersaults on doctrine, and that they have the right to do so. Which is it?

To properly answer this question, we have to define what rabbis are, what doctrine is, and what changes they have the right to make. These are not arbitrary questions or sophistry-today’s rabbis are not of the same legal status as those of the Sanhedrin, who received ordination in an unbroken line from Moses. A pretty thorough discussion is given here: http://traditionarchive.org/news/originals/Volume%2027/No.%204/The%20Nature%20And.pdf

Very roughly speaking, there are 613 Torah commandments. Rabbis of the Sanhedrin have the power to suspend some of them temporarily according to emergent needs. We see an example of this, for instance, with Elijah the Prophet, who makes a sacrifice at Mount Carmel to defeat the Baal and Ashurah worshippers, although it is forbidden to sacrifice anywhere outside the Tent of the Tabernacle. Another example we see is the prohibition emplaced by the Sages on blowing the Shofar on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashannah outside the Temple, if the day falls on Shabbat. Nobody claims the Torah commandment to blow the Shofar is now nonexistent, or that it does not apply on Shabbat, or that the Torah did not mean that the Shofar should be blown on Shabbat. Nevertheless, it is suspended.

There is also a Torah commandment to do everything the Sanhedrin tells us when it sits in its chamber, and a member of the Sanhedrin who, once a vote has been taken, refuses to go with the decision taken by the majority is liable for death when it comes to matters involving particularly grave commandments. Obviously, today there is no Sanhedrin and we are not bound by the Torah commandment to obey them.

Today, the power of rabbis comes exclusively from their acceptance by the community which appoints them. They have no power over anyone who does not accept them as an authority. All they have is persuasion. The only situation today when the rabbis can impose their authority upon the Jewish people as a whole is if the great and acknowledged leaders of a generation come together and make a unanimous decision about monetary matters or communal regulations. And even then, if the Jewish people as a whole do not follow it, the decision is voided (there is at least one example).

In any case, nobody has performed triple somersaults (except the Christians, the Reformists and other groups which have taken themselves out of Judaism). The function of the rabbis is to know the law (as a body-no individual can be expected to be an expert on absolutely everything,) to teach the law, and to apply the law to emergent situations in a coherent and productive way.

“Originally it was the practice to actually give a virgin two hundred and a widow one hundred; so the men would grow old and not take wives,”

You are in denial.

The wording of the Old Testament, the Talmud, and of the Elephantine scrolls is perfectly clear. It was the practice to give the owner of the virgin two hundred, not the virgin two hundred.

And two hundred is not an inordinate sum. The brideprice was pretty reasonable. It was the upkeep that was the problem.

Who gets the hundred for a widow? Well a widow in the time of the elephantine scrolls cannot remarry and has to remain faithful to her dead husband, or else return to the authority of her original owner, so, logically, if one wished to marry a widow one would have to pay off either the family of her husband, or the original owner – it is not clear which. Maybe both.

In any case, nobody has performed triple somersaults

When you claim, contrary to the clear wording of the Old Testament, the Talmud, and the Elephantine scrolls, that the virgin received the payment, you are committing a single somersault.

As usual, your reading comprehension sucks. If she divorces him, she “returns to her father’s house.” Well, her adoptive father, Meshullam, is not her guardian, which we can judge by the fact that Zakkur, her brother, is the one making the deal. Meshullam is presumably dead at this point. So “her father’s house” is a figure of speech. What does it mean? Well, we can look at a parallel contract, the wedding contract of Miphtaya:

Who the hell is Miphtaya? I am pretty sure she does not hail from five centuries or a thousand miles of the Elephantine scrolls.

>The wording of the Old Testament, the Talmud, and of the Elephantine scrolls is perfectly clear. It was the practice to give the owner of the virgin two hundred, not the virgin two hundred.

Three seconds; that’s all it would have taken you to google the quote. It is verbatim from the Talmud, Ketuboth 82b. The money is hers, not her guardian’s (she has no owner, she’s not a slave). In the Elephantine Scrolls you quoted, it specifically says that in the case the husband divorces her, she gets the money.

>And two hundred is not an inordinate sum.

How the hell would you know? You have an account in zuz? People who’ve dedicated lots of time and effort to this question aren’t so sure: http://www.jlaw.com/Articles/KETUBAH.pdf but as usual, you know everything about everything, including the purchasing power of a zuz translated to today’s dollars.

>The brideprice was pretty reasonable. It was the upkeep that was the problem.

Again, this is dumb. As we see from Proverbs, a good woman was expected to be a net gain to the household. The Talmud specifically says that young men had trouble raising the brideprice, which is exactly what we see all over the Muslim world today.

>Who gets the hundred for a widow? Well a widow in the time of the elephantine scrolls cannot remarry and has to remain faithful to her dead husband,

What? Where do you get this shit? Are you attempting to extrapolate from Yehoyishma’s marriage contract, which says that in the event of Ananiah’s death, if there are no children, she inherits all his property but can’t remarry without forfeiting it? This is a condition specific to this contract, not a general rule, just like the stipulation that Ananiah can’t take additional wives (which otherwise would have been fine.)

>or else return to the authority of her original owner, so, logically, if one wished to marry a widow one would have to pay off either the family of her husband, or the original owner – it is not clear which. Maybe both.

Lots of things are unclear to you. There is absolutely nothing in the Torah that says you can’t marry a widow, or that you have to pay someone off if you do. We just spent months talking about Boaz marrying Ruth.

>When you claim, contrary to the clear wording of the Old Testament, the Talmud, and the Elephantine scrolls, that the virgin received the payment, you are committing a single somersault.

I just quoted for you directly from the Talmud. I will quote again: “Originally it was the practice to actually give a virgin two hundred and a widow one hundred.”

I notice how you continue to ignore all the inconvenient points I brought up, such as that the brideprice (now the ketubah) never depended and still don’t depend on the bride’s age, beauty or any of the other variables that influence the price of chattel, or that Zakkur receives a brideprice which is tiny compared to what Yehoyishma is bringing to Ananiah’s house, which is CERTAINLY not the case with slaves or any other sort of property.

At the time these papyri were written, women were emancipated if divorced without good cause, but not emancipated if they divorced their husbands, or if divorced for cause.

The woman in question was twice divorced. Assuming one or both of her previous husbands divorced her without cause, rather than her divorcing him, or him divorcing her for cause, then she became self owned and free to go wherever she willed, as was promised in the marriage contract for a woman not previously divorced.

Hence the striking difference in the marriage contracts.

I presume that the intent here is that women should not make their own decisions about sex and reproduction, due to their notorious propensity to make such decisions badly for short term motives, unless the their owners make bad decisions for them, in which case they become self owned and able to make their own decisions.

I earlier proposed something similar in its effect – that if a woman’s owner appeared to renting her out, rather than transferring her to a durable marriage, he should lose authority over her. Twice divorced looks suspiciously like rental.

>At the time these papyri were written, women were emancipated if divorced without good cause, but not emancipated if they divorced their husbands, or if divorced for cause.

You are just making up a general rule here, based on nothing much.

>The woman in question was twice divorced. Assuming one or both of her previous husbands divorced her without cause, rather than her divorcing him, or him divorcing her for cause, then she became self owned and free to go wherever she willed, as was promised in the marriage contract for a woman not previously divorced.

This is a very convoluted explanation. One of those marriages didn’t count, being to a Egyptian (Jewish law does not recognize intermarriage.) The other was to Jezaniah.

We also have a contract between Miphtaiah’s father and her, where he transfers ownership of a house to her (slaves and livestock don’t have the ability to legally own stuff.)

We also have the contract between Meshullam and Tapmut, his Egyptian slave, whom he emancipated and married.

We see that free women are not property.

>I presume that the intent here is that women should not make their own decisions about sex and reproduction, due to their notorious propensity to make such decisions badly for short term motives, unless the their owners make bad decisions for them, in which case they become self owned and able to make their own decisions.

You presume too much. As I’ve told you repeatedly, free women don’t have owners. They might have guardians. A different concept.

>I earlier proposed something similar in its effect – that if a woman’s owner appeared to renting her out, rather than transferring her to a durable marriage, he should lose authority over her. Twice divorced looks suspiciously like rental.

For the thirty-ninth time. Free women don’t have owners and aren’t sold. They might have guardians. None of these contracts refer to free women as having “owners”-they have fathers, husbands, brothers, etc. You repeatedly attempt to ignore me pointing out that in this “sale” of a woman by her “owner,” her “owner” is getting a small amount from her husband, to whom he is “selling” her, and she is bringing several times that into her new household. This is not how property transactions work. When you sell a house to a guy for $200K, you don’t attach a bank account with $1 million in it to the sale.

I also like how you make statements with utter self-assurance that show you’re completely ignorant of whatever it is you’re proclaiming your authority on, then when you’re called out on it, shift your position as though nothing happened. “Who the hell is Miphtaya? I am pretty sure she does not hail from five centuries or a thousand miles of the Elephantine scrolls.” “Oh, Miphtaya was divorced, so different rules apply.” But, yeah, you know it’s those rabbis who are intellectually dishonest.

>At the time these papyri were written, women were emancipated if divorced without good cause, but not emancipated if they divorced their husbands, or if divorced for cause.

You are just making up a general rule here, based on nothing much.

Based on the elephantine marriage contracts:

Repeating the evidence. The marriage contract for the never married woman showed that she was property, but her contract said that if divorced by her husband without cause, she would then own herself. The marriage contract for a woman who clearly did own herself, was a marriage contract for a twice divorced woman.

Notice the striking difference in the wording of the marriage contracts for the never married woman, and the woman who has been divorced. Very different kinds of marriages. One is a contract with the owner of the woman for transfer of ownership, the other one is a contract for substantial but limited marital rights over her.

Free women don’t have owners and aren’t sold.

The marital contract for the never married woman looks mighty like a bill of sale, particularly when contrasted with the marital contract for the twice divorced woman.

One says that if the marriage goes south through her husband’s fault, she is free to go where she pleases – implying not otherwise free to go where she pleases. The other says that if the marriage goes south through either party’s fault she is free to go where she pleases.

It is difficult to make sense of the difference in the marriage contracts if one imagines a world in which women above the age of twelve years and six months do not have owners. If both women owned themselves, their marriage contracts should be substantially similar.

shift your position as though nothing happened. “Who the hell is Miphtaya? I am pretty sure she does not hail from five centuries or a thousand miles of the Elephantine scrolls.” “Oh, Miphtaya was divorced, so different rules apply.” But, yeah, you know it’s those rabbis who are intellectually dishonest.

I ask who the hell is Miphtaya, because you claim she does not fit into my account of property rights as expressed in the contracts. You tell me who she is, I look her up, and find she, being twice divorced, does fit into my account, because I already said that a woman divorced her husbands whim, not for fault, then became self owned, that being what the contracts said.

My position did not shift. Rather, you lied about the evidence, as you do in almost every conversation.

You repeatedly attempt to ignore me pointing out that in this “sale” of a woman by her “owner,” her “owner” is getting a small amount from her husband, to whom he is “selling” her, and she is bringing several times that into her new household.

The net effect of these transactions is, approximately, that if Ananiah pumps the woman Yehoyishma and dumps her, possibly pregnant, he has paid her family one karsh of silver for the privilege and her family has paid her rather more than seven karsh (the dowry) to take care of herself after being abandoned. If he keeps her all his days, he has received a dowry of slightly more than six karsh of silver for taking care of her and her children by him and has not paid anything for her.

That is evidence that she is cared for. It is not evidence that she is not property. I ignore your point because it is irrelevant.

I recall a case in the old South. A black slave woman accused a white man of stealing three hundred dollars from her. The white man argued it was improbable that a black slave would have three hundred dollars. The woman called her owner as witness, who testified that she had a fair bit more than three hundred dollars, that he had recently borrowed that sum from her, and that she had been “very particular”about being paid back by the promised time.

It is not clear that the three hundred stolen was the same three hundred her owner had borrowed and returned, but there is no doubt the slave owned three hundred dollars.

Further, though slaves can own stuff, it is far from clear that the woman Miphtaiah owned stuff, that women in the times that the elephantine scrolls could own stuff.

While Judean marriage contracts are always between the husband and the bride, Elephantine contracts are never with the bride, but with the head of the family of the bride, always a male.

Elephantine marriage contracts show concern for the welfare of the bride, but frequently show little concern for her voluntary choices.

>The marriage contract for the never married woman showed that she was property, but her contract said that if divorced by her husband without cause, she would then own herself.

You ignore context when it pleases and blow it out of context when it pleases. Yehoishma was not just a “never married woman,” but a slave emancipated conditionally. The condition being that she take care of her owner and his son. In this contract, she is being released from this condition, unless she decides to divorce her husband without cause (cause including him taking a second wife-not something “property” would have an opinion about.)

>The marriage contract for a woman who clearly did own herself, was a marriage contract for a twice divorced woman.

Again, you ignore context.

>It is difficult to make sense of the difference in the marriage contracts if one imagines a world in which women above the age of twelve years and six months do not have owners. If both women owned themselves, their marriage contracts should be substantially similar.

I’ve told you Yehoyishma was a slave emancipated on condition higher in the thread, but you have selective illiteracy.

>I ask who the hell is Miphtaya, because you claim she does not fit into my account of property rights as expressed in the contracts.

You ask who the hell she is (actually, claim she has nothing to do with Elephantine papyri) because you assume that if you are ignorant of something, it does not exist.

>The net effect of these transactions is, approximately, that if Ananiah pumps the woman Yehoyishma and dumps her, possibly pregnant, he has paid her family one karsh of silver for the privilege and her family has paid her rather more than seven karsh (the dowry) to take care of herself after being abandoned. If he keeps her all his days, he has received a dowry of slightly more than six karsh of silver for taking care of her and her children by him and has not paid anything for her.

There’s no “pump and dump” in Judaism. A divorce is a divorce. “Her family has paid her”-does one pay a sheep?

That is evidence that she is cared for. It is not evidence that she is not property. I ignore your point because it is irrelevant.

>I recall a case in the old South. A black slave woman accused a white man of stealing three hundred dollars from her.

You are an idiot. In Judaism, slaves don’t own anything (not talking about Hebrew bondsmen, but slaves-slaves.) Of what relevance is Alabaman jurisprudence?

>Further, though slaves can own stuff, it is far from clear that the woman Miphtaiah owned stuff, that women in the times that the elephantine scrolls could own stuff.

It is far from clear to you because you are too stupid and arrogant to read what is in front of your eyes. ASIDE from Miphthaiah’s marriage contracts, there is a papyrus where Miphthaiah buys a house from her father for 50 shekels. “It is far from clear”…

>While Judean marriage contracts are always between the husband and the bride, Elephantine contracts are never with the bride, but with the head of the family of the bride, always a male.

Now you are an expert on Judean marriage contracts, too? Good job. Could you please provide sources?

>Which sinks the orthodox Jewish pretense that they are following the same law as the Old Testament. Like everyone else, they are blowing in the wind, and the wind these days blows progressive.

>It is difficult to make sense of the difference in the marriage contracts if one imagines a world in which women above the age of twelve years and six months do not have owners. If both women owned themselves, their marriage contracts should be substantially similar.

I’ve told you Yehoyishma was a slave emancipated on condition higher in the thread, but you have selective illiteracy.

Clearly, the legal system within which these contracts were made presupposes that women do not have agency, in that contracts are made not with the woman, but with the (male) head of family.

Looking at the contracts, we conclude that the male heads of family were motivated by the welfare of the women, and that some women, to varying degrees, have in practice, but not in legal form, some agency.

Given the legal form, the legal form being that the contract is between the husband and the head of the wife’s family, generalizing from the fact that some women have in practice some de-facto agency, to the conclusion that all women by legal right and social norms have agency, is an unreasonably large stretch.

If women had agency by legal right and by social norm, the contracts would be between husband and wife, not between husband and head of family.

If women had agency by legal right and by social norm, the contracts would be standardized as to their agency, or would not address it at all.

The form of the Elephantine contracts implies a society in which women are legally absolutely property, and the substance of the Elephantine contracts implies a society in which women are property in legal theory but in practice, often allowed to get away with lots of stuff.

Similarly, the laws on marriage, rape and seduction in the Old Testament imply a society in which women are almost as much property as sheep, and male children not much better. When the marriage of Isaac and Rebekah is made, the marriage consists not of a wedding ceremony in which the multitude see the couple make vows, but a handshake between patriarchs (a patriarch and another patriarch’s representative) which implies a society in which women and children are in legal theory as much property as sheep. But then, to the evident surprise of Abraham’s representative, Rebekah gets a belated say, showing that practice does not necessarily always accord with legal theory. Long suffering Isaac, however, never gets a say, showing that practice frequently does accord with legal theory.

Nature gives women a great deal of power. The law, therefore, should give them very little. When law is actually applied, nature creeps back in.

>I recall a case in the old South. A black slave woman accused a white man of stealing three hundred dollars from her.

You are an idiot. In Judaism, slaves don’t own anything (not talking about Hebrew bondsmen, but slaves-slaves.) Of what relevance is Alabaman jurisprudence?

How do you know?

>Which sinks the orthodox Jewish pretense that they are following the same law as the Old Testament. Like everyone else, they are blowing in the wind, and the wind these days blows progressive.

Yes, yes, the same tune. Are we still on for that bottle of Ardbeg?

We were arguing about what would constitute the Cathedral victory condition on gay marriage. I specified that the Cathedral is victorious on gay weddings if a gay wedding takes place in what the New York Times somewhat plausibly claims to be an orthodox synagogue, and the rest of the Orthodox Community fail to conspicuously cut any real, imaginary or alleged ties to that synagogue, and fail to thoroughly disown it as not orthodox.

I did not understand your proposed Cathedral victory condition. Sounded to me that you were saying that so long as Orthodox Jews pretend that the letter of Jewish law has not changed, they can celebrate the bar mitzvah ceremony with public sodomy and it is not a Cathedral victory condition.

>Clearly, the legal system within which these contracts were made presupposes that women do not have agency, in that contracts are made not with the woman, but with the (male) head of family.

This is simply untrue. In a system where women have no agency, they certainly can’t sell houses (for instance,) especially to their own fathers.

>Looking at the contracts, we conclude that the male heads of family were motivated by the welfare of the women, and that some women, to varying degrees, have in practice, but not in legal form, some agency.

This is your conclusion, but it’s not so. The male may be acting as the woman’s legal representative/guardian, but it is depending on her consent.

>If women had agency by legal right and by social norm, the contracts would be between husband and wife, not between husband and head of family.

Not at all. The woman always had the right to turn down a marriage, i.e., her guardian couldn’t marry her off against her will (except for a special case.) Agency is demonstrated by the fact that in the Elephantine Papyri, you see that there is a provision for a woman to divorce her husband. That’s pretty much the definition of agency. True, there are certain material conditions, but this doesn’t invalidate agency.

>The form of the Elephantine contracts implies a society in which women are legally absolutely property

Nonsense. Property can’t own or sell property.

>Similarly, the laws on marriage, rape and seduction in the Old Testament imply a society in which women are almost as much property as sheep, and male children not much better.

It’s like bouncing dried beans off a wall, talking to you. The Torah law of rape is different from the law on seduction, and in exactly a way that shows that women ARE people, and DO have agency. A married woman who is seduced is put to death. A married woman who is raped is not. An unbetrothed woman who is seduced can make the seducer marry her, but he can divorce her. An unbetrothed woman who is raped can make the seducer marry her, and he CAN’T divorce her (plus he owes damages.)

>When the marriage of Isaac and Rebekah is made, the marriage consists not of a wedding ceremony in which the multitude see the couple make vows, but a handshake between patriarchs (a patriarch and another patriarch’s representative) which implies a society in which women and children are in legal theory as much property as sheep.

I have already told you that 1) this episode is not relevant, since it precedes the giving of the Torah by several centuries, 2) it is not a comprehensive transcript but key moments in the story.

>Nature gives women a great deal of power. The law, therefore, should give them very little. When law is actually applied, nature creeps back in.

Nature gives women no power. It takes a highly unnatural state of law, order and prosperity for them to have such power.

>How do you know?

How do I know what, that in Judaism a slave’s property is his master’s by default (unless he makes special provisions)? It’s in the Talmud, all over the place. For instance, you can’t take monetary deposits from a slave for safekeeping, because you must suspect that he is stealing it from his master.

>We were arguing about what would constitute the Cathedral victory condition on gay marriage. I specified that the Cathedral is victorious on gay weddings if a gay wedding takes place in what the New York Times somewhat plausibly claims to be an orthodox synagogue, and the rest of the Orthodox Community fail to conspicuously cut any real, imaginary or alleged ties to that synagogue, and fail to thoroughly disown it as not orthodox.

This is simply untrue. In a system where women have no agency, they certainly can’t sell houses (for instance,) especially to their own fathers.

Give me a link. I have not found that your account of Elephantine contracts resembles my reading of them. Rather than giving what is in the contract, you give a talmudic re-interpretation of the contract.

Supposing it says what you think it says, Negro slaves in the old South could buy and sell stuff, as for example the woman lending three hundred dollars to her owner, who was “very particular”about it being repaid on time.

Further, all your arguments are of the form “Well they were not totally treated like a chest of drawers one hundred percent of the time, therefore they were equal to men.” – standard Talmudic reasoning for which talmudists are so infamous.

Not at all. The woman always had the right to turn down a marriage, i.e., her guardian couldn’t marry her off against her will

If so, the elephantine scrolls would record her consent. They don’t. Reading between the lines implicit or de facto consent seems likely in some cases. In other cases, reading between the lines does not really give us a hint.

If any women mentioned in the elephantine scrolls gave consent, that consent was informal, unofficial, and unrecorded. It may well have been de facto for some women some of the time, but never de jure. It is always physically possible for a woman to walk out on her husband or to sleep with someone else, and in that sense “consent” is required, but kind of society implied by the scrolls is the kind of society where that sort of behavior will at best result in the wife being stripped of all assets and sent out in the street, if she is lucky, and will usually result in the ex-wife being tied to the clothesline and beaten like a rug.

It’s like bouncing dried beans off a wall, talking to you.

That is because your arguments are circular, in that they assume that the twenty first century rabbinic interpretation of the Talmud and Old Testament is unchanged and unchanging, when the issue in dispute is that interpretation is changing with alarming speed.

Your arguments are also talmudic, in that you commit text torture upon the sources. You taldmudically torture the source text till it confesses to an arcane hidden meaning.

The Torah law of rape is different from the law on seduction,

The difference is that rape is a property crime against the owner’s right to the sexual and reproductive services of a woman, in which only the man is guilty, and seduction is a a property crime against the owner’s right to the sexual and reproductive services of a woman, in which both the man and the women are guilty. There is no difference in the law’s treatment of a man who seduces or a man who rapes.

And this is in fact the right kind of law to have, this is the way law should be, because men are far more distressed and harmed by being cuckolded, than women are distressed and harmed by being raped. If a woman is in the laundromat at midnight, you know she is not married, because if she had a husband, he would not allow her to go to the laundromat at midnight by herself. And because cuckoldry in itself undermines the family, and thus society and the state, while rape does not in itself undermine the family, society and the state, except to the extent that it is cuckoldry.

How do I know what, that in Judaism a slave’s property is his master’s by default (unless he makes special provisions)? I

And in recently existent slavery, we know that it is extremely common for the owner to make special provisions.

A poorly behaved slave, the great majority, work under the immediate threat of the lash. This is, as you say, expensive, because you need a competent person wielding the lash.

The better kind of slave could be motivated by more distant incentives, such as property. This is in fact, a lot more efficient, so was done in practice whenever it worked. Such slaves were usually freed eventually.

Yes, ok, fine, with the caveat that “Open Orthodoxy” is not Orthodoxy, which has already been pointed out by many rabbis in the Orthodox community:

Modern Orthodox and Open Orthodox are not well defined distinct movements, in the sense that you don’t have congregations that think of themselves as a particular type of orthodox.

Further, the difference between these orthodoxies is troublingly small. For example I read up a debate on the Amalekites. The Old Testament commands Jews to remember them, and to forget them, to erase them from history, which seeming contradiction the orthodox use a justification for distancing themselves from the command to genocide, Modern Orthodox distancing themselves a minutely greater distance than plain Orthodox.

Now in fact there is no contradiction. The Amalekites were designated for extermination to eradicate a dangerous and infectious belief system. And no one today has any idea what that belief system was, or why it needed to be eradicated. Which fulfills both the command to remember, and the command to forget.

History suggests that some belief systems, particularly those involving human sacrifice, often need to be eradicated, and need extreme measures to eradicate. Thus it quite probable that genocide was advisable, though because the belief system was, as commanded, forgotten, we cannot know this.

So I read modern orthodox rationalizing away the genocide command, and I read orthodox disagreeing with them – mildly. I don’t read orthodox saying “Sometimes genocide is what it takes, and word of God is that this was one of those cases.” It does not read like a debate between two religions, but rather a debate between two tendencies in one religion.

the 120 iq people can listen and nod their head to a lot of different things. Including transpolyamory. Can you compete in the mind of a 120 iq person with transpolyamory? If not, and 120iq people without any reason to care about anything other than their prospects for future sex partners are allowed to vote, you are going to be ruled by Jews.

All you need to do to become a Jew is learn Hebrew, get cut & convert to Judaism and serve in the IDF. Not a bad deal overall. Israel is a tough place to live in, but tough places and times breed tough people, and that’s all good..

Voting though, is a problem. However, if only 120 IQs and above were allowed to vote, democracy would suck less. Most of them are not that intellectualy incurious.

haha, yeah, that’s the way to do it, become a Jew. Do you know that different Jewish communities have different attitudes towards converts, Jews have always defined themselves as a people, and DNA shows that they are what they say they are?

There is a commandment to love the convert. Once he’s converted, of course. Every single community I’ve ever been in/known has had converts, from the guys with the furry hats and the 18th century clothes to the settlers up in the hills to the Modern Orthodox yuppies in America. Nobody made a big deal about them.

I don’t think you should convert, though. Not because we have enough of our own idiots-there’s always room for one more. But a conversion has to be earnest, and I doubt you’re capable of earnesty.

I knew this prohibition would hit you especially hard. Take heart-with some structure in your life and all the time and energy savings, you might find a woman willing to have relations with you. Hard to believe, but there it is.

>Wow B. You dont like Christians, Muslims, OR Atheists. You’re a type of Jew I haven’t met before. Usually they like at least one of those.

Why should I like any of these groups? Valorous individuals belonging to them, sure, but the groups as a whole? 34 Righteousness exalteth a nation; but the kindness of the nations is sin.

So, basically, you claim really smart people are not smart enough to explain themselves in a way mere 120 IQ plebs can fathom.

It is hard, and frequently one simply just does not get through. Depends on what one is talking about. Obviously harder on the kind of topics that are apt to come up in engineering.

So, when Google had all smart engineers, their smartest engineers were OK, since the gap between the smartest and the the less smart not very large. But when affirmative action engineers were brought in, suddenly they were mansplaining, and their bosses knew well that accusations of mansplaining have a strong tendency to become accusations of sexual harassment and rape.

Does Google even have AA engineers? Last time I checked they were in hot water with SJWs,as they claimed their demographic composition was a ‘trade secret’. That is, they had few latinos and almost no blacks.

Obviously harder on the kind of topics that are apt to come up in engineering.

Sure, there are irreducibly complex problems, ones which can’t be simplified so 1 in 30 plebs like me can get them.

But really smart people are better at getting at the root of the problem and solving it neatly, instead of solving it in a complex, haphazard manner. And coming up with good metaphors, no doubt.

It has very few black or Latino engineers, but a lot of female engineers, all of them markedly and conspicuously less competent than the male engineers who made Google great.

The poster girl who screwed up the Google+ project is currently shaking them down on charges of sexism. She is dumb as a post, but was conspicuously, and with a great deal of publicity, placed in charge of men much more competent than she.

how did they fuck that up??? They had the experience of Orkut, and watched what Myspace and Facebook did. They had the industry clout to come up with something better than Facebook when Facebook was at its most hated; now people have just resigned themselves to using Facebook.

You’d think a woman would just take something nice and fill it with dating features! If they had copied Facebook, made it easier to control privacy, be anonymous, download and delete your personal data, it would have taken over like literally everyone expected it to.

I see this idea a lot, but it’s very strange. Smart people have access to higher levels of abstraction and greater subtlety of reasoning, less intelligent people do not. There is no amount of ‘explanation’ that could bridge the gap. The complexity of the phenomenon determines the complexity of the explanation.

Given that Feynman has been brought up: Feynman was a great scientist, a great teacher and he wrote a popular book on Quantum Electrodynamics. This does not mean he could explain QED to a layman. Popular science books do not explain science to laymen, they popularise science for laymen. You cannot understand physics by reading popularisations. They contain analogies and diagrams and anecdotes, not physics. Being able to teach undergrads undergraduate physics doesn’t mean Feynmann could explain QED to laymen either. The only people Feynman could teach QED to were people smart enough to understand QED.

Einstein and Oppenheimer were Communists/sympathizers, and their political statements were also idiotic, although they had much higher IQs. Most of the people I’ve known who were of comparable intellect to her were comparably stupid when it came to this sort of thing. First, smart people are more vulnerable to state propaganda (see: Scott Aaronson, who almost cut his genitals off so they would stop making him have Crimethoughts.) Second, power is seductive, and what is the ability to destroy people other than pure power? https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/576937785736597504

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”-it’s even more difficult to get him to understand something when his power and identity depend on him not understanding it.

B said:slaves and livestock don’t have the ability to legally own stuff.

You have a very progressive and anti property rights view of slave ownership. In my years of reading history there’s very few human groups who didn’t allow their slaves to own property. Your point about the ownership of women is invalid.

There’s a subtle problem here. Exam questions don’t give much indication of exam answers; for these, you need to look at actual exam paper scripts. Thus for example I suspect that blacks in Britain have exam scripts that are terrifyingly stupid and illiterate. They could easily be sampled, scanned, and put online anonymously. Why isn’t this done? I’d say because the jews controlling all this don’t want to draw attention to the joke standards of blacks. I may be wrong – but I’d like to see the evidence.
.
Similarly, Oxbridge papers are difficult, but who knows what the scripts were like? What sort of crap would ‘Ed’ Miliband or Camoron come up with, for example?